Bing goes live with Facebook Social Search

cNet

Bing has rolled out its new social search, a feature that can display profiles and updates from your Facebook friends as part of your Bing search results.

This step of the Facebook integration has been in the works for a few weeks, but the techs at Bing fine-tuned the feature before yesterday's rollout, according to a post on the official Bing blog.

The new social search integrates with Facebook in a couple of ways.

If you opt to link your Facebook account with your Bing log-in, searching for the name of one of your Facebook friends in Bing brings up a link to that person's entire profile in your results. This is true even if that person has elected not to share their Facebook profile with any search engines, since only you can see those results. So if you have a Facebook friend named Jerry Seinfeld, a link to his profile will appear alongside results for the famed comedian.

Early testers of the Facebook integration were apparently unhappy that they couldn't view the profiles of their friends through Bing with the same ease they could through Facebook itself, according to the blog, leading Microsoft to set up this specific type of access.

Further, Bing tweaked the age requirements. Facebook requires its users to be 13 or older, but Bing initially limited profile search results to people 18 and older. Based on customer feedback, Microsoft changed this option to let all your Facebook friends regardless of age show up in your Bing search results.

The Bing and Facebook team-up also can retrieve results for items "liked by your Facebook friends." So if you're looking for opinions on a certain movie or restaurant, Bing can show you any Facebook friends who "liked" those specific items.

The ease with which Facebook information can flow into Bing may arouse some privacy concerns. The integration is a one-way street, so no information goes from Bing back to Facebook. But still, anyone wary of the new social search can control or turn off the feature on both accounts.

Google Social Search Obtains Beta Status

Information Week

Google on Wednesday moved its Social Search experiment from Google Labs to beta status, meaning that it's now a mainstream search option for anyone who believes that the fetishes and fascinations of friends will make Google search results more relevant.

The beta label will remain for a while, the company said, because there's still work to do. The re-branded Social Search will be available in English, though perhaps not immediately everywhere -- Google said it could take a few days to roll out.

Google introduced Social Search last October after several years of dipping its toes in the social waters through various forms of search personalization.

Its public commitment to Social Search occurred at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, an event at which Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg declared, "There is a very fundamental shift going on from the information Web to the social Web."

Social Search on Google requires a Google Account and a Google Profile. Users who fill out their Profiles with contact information or add links in their Profiles to other social Internet services, such as Blogger, Twitter, and the like, have the option of seeing what their online associates have posted when it relates to a given search.

Google has extended Social Search to include Google Images, a move that simplifies finding photos shared by friends through services like Flickr and Picasa Web Albums.

The company has added two new Social Search links, labeled "My social circle" and "My social content," that make it easier to see how one's friends fit into Social Search and to see how one's own public pages may appear to friends using Google SEO.

Evidently oblivious to the lack of privacy implied by Social Search, Google on Thursday said it was celebrating Data Privacy Day by publishing the privacy principles under which it has been operating.