Seven months on the team and my first major launch with Bing. We’ve had several smaller ones along the way, but this one steals the show for sure. Some great pick up coverage already like this one in New York Times. And I love the comments like this which point out the not-so-sexy but critical relevance perception gap that I’ve highlighted before.
“This should make Bing more versatile but what it has going for it now, first and foremost, is this: the search results of Bing are – difficult to believe – at par with Google. I don’t know if it had anything to do with the algo change that Google made but when searching for news I was pulling up a lot of marginal blogs I didn’t care for. So I switched to Bing and was surprised by how much it had improved. The right panel with flowing twitter feeds relevant to the search phrase are just very cool… “
So what’s social search all about? The best way to illustrate is to walk through a scenario. Say I’m heading out to New York. I do a search on Bing and I get a great “instant answer”:
As well as some key pieces of info, I also see that I have a few friends who live in the area pulled from info on Facebook. Dazhi used to work with me at Microsoft and now I see he is in New York so I check out his Facebook profile.
While there, I see he likes a site called Holy Kaw. Not sure what that is, I search on Bing. NOTE: If YOU do this search, you will see the answer below but unless one of your friends also likes the site, you won’t see any likes. Bing results are PERSONAL to you. Anyways, right there on the results page, I see an answer about the site and the fact that Dazhi likes it.
So of course, I check out the site. Now, I notice on the right hand side that I have the option to like the site myself. But sometimes it’s hard to tell whether you are liking the fan page of the site or the just the webpage. I just want to do the latter, so I use the universal like button on the new Bing Bar (top right corner of image below) to like just the site. This is the first like button that you can use anywhere on the web, which is pretty powerful.
All this sounds pretty interesting. Let’s say I wanted to get in touch with Dazhi. I can do a search from within Bing and voila, I have a people answer. I see Dazhi and can even send him a Facebook message from Bing.
Now, I turn my attention to something else, cooking the family dinner. Anyone who knows my wife will know that she eats anything as long as it has chicken in it. So I do a search for chicken recipes. I get the usual answers, but at the bottom of the first page, I see this site I would never have found, but an old colleague of mine seems to like it. With Bing social search, we’ve matched the entity site to the search term and shown which friends like it. Pretty cool.
OK, so to cook one of the recipes, I need a decent wok as ours is pretty run down. So I go to Bing shopping and search for woks, and I get the result below. I filter down to a price range I like and can add the items to my shopping list. Now, I’m no expert on woks but some of my friends are. With one click I can share the list on Facebook and get suggestions from my friends on the best one.
All this is built on the “like-o-sphere”. The more people like things, the more tailored results will get. Now, I am not advocating indiscriminate liking, but it’s sometimes good to call out cool things you discover on the web. Your friends may not know to ask you, but you can bet sometimes they wish they had. You can help them by downloading the Bing Bar and using the like button!
To see the social features on Bing, you will need to sign in either using the Bing Bar or using the little Facebook icon on the top right of the page, see image below.
Try out your own scenarios. And if you are still living in the dark ages of Google, see if you can find anything social. Give Bing a shot, you never know, you might even “Like” us 
Game on!
