Social Search | Cheryl Waller

Bing Now Allows Users To Like And Comment On Facebook Entries Right From Its Social Sidebar

May 10, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Bing‘s social sidebar, which shows relevant entries from your Facebook friends, Twitter, Klout, Quora and other services, just got a lot more interactive. You can now like Facebook posts in the social sidebar and add their own comments. In addition you can now also see all of the existing comments on a post right in the sidebar, too.

This, Microsoft believes, will make the social search experience on Bing even more interactive, engaging and helpful than before.

It also means users don’t have to leave Bing to engage with these posts. Chances are, after all, that they will get distracted by all of the other goodies Facebook has to offer once they leave Bing and won’t return anytime soon.

Personally, I’ve never found these social search results all that useful. Microsoft, however, clearly believes that this, in combination with what they are doing around semantic search, will allow it to continue to compete with Google, which seems to have de-emphasized social search over the last few months.

With its Scroogled campaign and “Bing It On” challenge, Microsoft has obviously been taking a far more aggressive stance against Google in recent months and it’s slowly adding new users. Currently, Google has a market share of about 67 percent in the U.S., and Bing is close to reaching 17 percent.

There have been some recent rumors, however, that Yahoo is looking to drop Bing as its search provider (Yahoo currently commands just under 12 percent of the U.S. search market with its Bing-powered search), but given the long-term deal between the two companies, that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

Filed Under: Bing, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Microsoft, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, social search, TC

Bing Revamps Its Social Search With 5x More Content From Your Facebook Friends, Now Includes Status Updates, Links & Comments

January 17, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Microsoft just announced a major update to Bing’s social search results. Just like Facebook is now integrating Bing deeper into its search tools, Microsoft is now adding more Facebook content to Bing, too. In total, Microsoft says, “five times more of your friends’ content on Facebook is now searchable in the sidebar.” In addition to the photos you could already see in previous versions, Bing now also shows status updates, shared links and comments from your friends.

“For every query, there is at least one person with the right answer,” Microsoft says. Whenever its algorithms now detect a query where a Facebook comment or shared link could be useful, it will surface this in the sidebar, making the content there a lot more interesting than in previous iterations. This, says Microsoft, means it is now “easier to see who knows and what they’ve shared related to your search. So when your friends aren’t around, Bing is the perfect stand-in.”

The larger pool of data, of course, also means that you will likely see Facebook results more often when you search on Bing now. Microsoft, of course, notes that it respects Facebook’s privacy settings. “Nothing is shared automatically, you only see what your friends give you permission to see (though their Facebook settings) so you only share what you want to share.”

With this update, Microsoft also launched a new “Friends’ Photos experience” that uses a larger lightbox to show relevant photos your friends posted on Facebook. Microsoft, it is worth noting, already put a stronger emphasis on photos with its last design refresh in December and today’s release seems to iterate on this.

Microsoft also made a few design changes. You now don’t have to hover of a friend’s avatar to see additional content, for example. Instead, the social updates are now immediately displayed in the sidebar when you load the search results page.

Just like before, Bing will obviously continue to also highlight content from Twitter, Quora, foursquare and other social networks, but it’s pretty obvious that the focus is now squarely on Facebook updates.

Filed Under: Bing, Facebook, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, social search, TC

Bing Gives Its Social Sidebar A More Streamlined Look

December 11, 2012 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Bing‘s social sidebar, which displays relevant results from friends and experts on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, is one of the defining features of Microsoft’s search engine. Today, Microsoft is giving the social sidebar a bit of a facelift by removing the dark gray background and making the overall design more streamlined and less cluttered.

While Microsoft doesn’t emphasize this in its announcement, the new layout also seems to put a stronger emphasis on images by offering larger thumbnails for Facebook photos, for example.

What the Bing team does note, though, is that users don’t have to hover over a friend’s avatar anymore to see additional content. Instead, all of the info is now available right in the sidebar. There is also now a “+ see all” icon that gives you access to even more social results. Microsoft also says the new design means there is less blank space on the page.

One design element that seems to be gone in this redesign is the “Ask friends” box at the top of the search social sidebar. Bing replaced this with a Facebook “post” button that works about the same, but doesn’t include the call to action.

These changes will roll out over the next few days, so it may take a while before you will see them when you search on Bing.

The social sidebar, of course, is a key feature of Bing. Over time, though, Microsoft kept adding new services to it and it often felt rather cluttered. The new design removes a lot of this clutter, and the fact that it’s now flush with the rest of the results also makes the sidebar feel more like an integral part of the search experience.

Just yesterday, it’s worth noting, Microsoft added some interesting new features to its Knowledge Graph-like snapshot feature, which occupies the middle column on the Bing search results pages. Unlike Google, though, which seems to be in the process of slowly de-emphasizing its social search efforts in favor of its Knowledge Graph results, Bing continues to mostly focus on its social search results.

Filed Under: Bing, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, design, Facebook, Microsoft, Search, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, social search, TC

Hover For A Rec: Google Updates +1 Button To Show Related Content On Your Website

June 26, 2012 by Rip Empson Leave a Comment

Well it looks like Google just can’t wait for the start of its Developer Conference tomorrow to begin sharing news. It’s been a while since we’ve seen any development of the company’s now ubiquitous “+1″ button, but beginning soon, your +1s are going to get a whole lot more useful (and creepy?). Tonight, Google announced via the Google+ Developers Blog that it is rolling out a new feature in “platform review” — from now on, when users hover over a +1 button on your website, they will see recommendations for other related content on your site.

For example, if a user navigates to the Chrome Web Store to look at +1 recommendations on the Gmail app, they will be able to view not only related apps but recommendations from their friends as well. Of course, recommendations tend to be useless if they’re not relevant or topical, so Google says that its recommendations will “always refer to pages on the same domain or subdomain as the +1 button.”

This obviously has great appeal for site owners, as they have assurance that visitors will be seeing other content that’s native to their site, which will hopefully, in turn, encourage engagement and interaction with their site’s content. It’s another way to close that loop and bring an added level of stickiness.

For site owners that have already integrated the +1 button onto their websites, recommendations will begin appearing soon. But it’s not just for site owners … Google says that recommendations will be live across all buttons (for all users), regardless of whether or not they’re signed into Google+. +1 for that.

Recommendations will begin going live over the next few weeks, but for those who want an early test, Google asks that you sign up for the developer preview group and start offering your feedback. Google will be iterating quickly over the next few weeks and will be incorporating feedback into the new feature.

Whether or not users like the direction, Google search was always going to get more social. As we’ve said before, innately, people trust recommendations from their friends more than they do from strangers — or algorithms. The update to the +1 button makes sense as part of Google’s larger strategy to use Google+ as a way of authenticating and “socializing” search.

Google is a datavore and crawling and indexing sites as it does, it’s a quick leap for Google to begin serving recommendations from content on your site through the little positive conduit that is the +1 button. It encourages users to peruse through a site’s content (though it’s not totally clear how it’s prioritizing the content to serve, though I assume based on clicks/popularity) in a way that feels more personalized, meanwhile it gives site owners more incentive to add +1 buttons on their sites if they haven’t already, expanding Google’s already Big Brother-esque reach.

Part of Facebook weaving itself into the fabric of the Web was Facebook Connect and its “Like” button. Google has followed (and is following) suit, giving +1 a feature that “Likes” just don’t have. And with its hand firmly in control of the Search Lever, these are all moves meant to improve, personalize, and “socialize” the search experience. In turn, that presumably means higher authenticity of rankings, recommendations, and ownership, which means that Google real estate becomes more valuable to advertisers.

We may not like how it’s unfolding, but it certainly is interesting to watch Google unfolding its limbs.

For more, see Google’s blog post here.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: 1, Blogging, Facebook, Google, Recommendations, Search, search engine optimization, SEO, site owners, social, Social Networking, social search, TC

Owning Your Content In Search: Google Now Makes It Easier To Link Your Website To G+

June 13, 2012 by Rip Empson Leave a Comment

Last year, Google announced an initiative to give authors on the Web greater ownership over their content and more visibility in search. Google Authorship, as its known, has changed consistently since launch, as the company experiments with the best ways to authenticate authors and give them proper attribution.

Unfortunately, up to this point, the authentication process has been fairly convoluted. Rick DeJarnette’s post last week illustrates that clearly. There are a lot of steps and blog platforms like WordPress, for example, require additional configuration to enable authentication. It’s been confusing users to the detriment of the service.

The process, however, is evolving. It’s gone from adding code to your site’s pages to something that’s more automatic. As part of this, Google announced today that it’s made it a lot easier to link your website to your Google+ page.

Whether or not users like it, Google search was always going to get more social. Innately, people trust recommendations from their friends more than they do from strangers, or algorithms.

As Kevin Gibbons recently pointed out, Google Authorship is essentially Google’s way of bringing together personalized search with its social search — your social graph, in this case brought to you by Google+.

There are a whole mess of reasons why Google Authorship is important. For starters, it lets those who create the web’s content claim that content and make it their own, adding their name and image next to the byline of their articles, blogs, etc. That makes their content stand out. With few exceptions, content creators want to have their personal brand attached to their links — it’s good for business.

For Google, social media and author authentication help them measure the influence (and trustworthiness) of content and links and, ideally, serve better results. If results have been authenticated with authorship — they’re “owned” by personal and company brands — searchers get better results and advertisers spend more knowing they’re getting more bang for their buck.

But, “I don’t use G+, no one outside of Google does, so why would I do that?” you cry. Well, it makes it easier to have your authorship show up in search as a result. By god, reader! Own your content! Dennis Troper explains that linking your site to G+ means that:

“Your recent posts can appear in lots of relevant places across Google. For example: When users search for your brand, an excerpt from a recent Google+ post may appear to the right of search results.”

Now, page owners can link their sites in a few steps:

1) Visit your Google+ page, open its profile, and click ‘Edit profile’
2) On the About tab, save your website URL, then click the new button, ‘Link website’
3) Follow the instructions for adding a short line of code to your website’s homepage, then click ‘Test website’

According to Troper, if the set up goes as planned, users will then see a confirmation message. Then, after a day or two, “the link between your website and your Google+ page will be active, and a check icon will appear next to your URL on your profile.” That means you’re good to go.

Typepad said in a blog post today that it, too, has been working with Google to make authentication easier for its users. It’s a little bit more complicated than just adding your site to G+, but it’s still pretty straightforward. Find those steps here.

Wajam Brings Its Enhanced Social Search Results To Bing and Yahoo

May 14, 2012 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

As all the major search engines continue to add social search features to their feature line-up, it can often look as if there isn’t any space left for startups in this space. Wajam begs to differ. The Montreal-based company is probably one of the most ambitious players in the social search market right now and after launching its latest efforts for Google last month, it is now ready to bring its enhanced social search results to Bing and Yahoo as well.

Wajam is a browser plugin (as well as a standalone social search engine) that automatically integrates the company’s own social search results from your network on the search result pages of Google, Bing and Yahoo. It also works on a number of other popular sites, including Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor and YouTube.

Wajam creates its own index of everything your friends share on Google+, Facebook and Twitter. It’s worth noting that it looks at your friends’ status updates, as well as the sites they link to. It then applies its own PageRank-like algorithms to rank these status updates and sites depending on what you are searching for and displays its results alongside your standard search results.

As Wajam’s founder and CEO Martin-Luc Archambault told me earlier today, the service currently has over 2 billion pieces of content in its index. Archambault stressed that Wajam’s algorithms are also able to categorize the items in its index (think pictures, restaurants, hotels, videos etc.). The company’s latest data shows that it is currently able to show social search results for around 44% of its users’ queries.

With this update, Wajam is bringing its redesigned interface to Bing and Yahoo. The update, of course, comes at an interesting time, given that Bing announced its social search updates just a few days ago. Wajam, however, argues that it offers a far more complete social search experience than Bing because it also includes results from private updates your friends have shared with you (assuming you opt-in to this feature) and because it also highlights photos and videos, as well as product recommendations.

Wajam also notes that while Bing lets you ask your friends questions right from its search result pages, Wajam gives you results immediately. Unlike Bing, Wajam also lets you filter results by date, relevancy, links, photos and videos.

The Wajam team also put together this little infographic that explains how its approach to social search differs from Bing’s, Yahoo’s and Google’s.

Filed Under: Bing, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, social search, startups, TC, wajam

Wajam’s Updated Social Search Takes On Google’s “Search, Plus Your World”

April 23, 2012 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Ever since it launched earlier this year, Google’s “Search Plus Your World” initiative has been criticized for favoring results from its own social network over those from larger and more popular services like Facebook and Twitter. Even though Google’s focus on Google+ is keeping the market open for competition, social search isn’t exactly an easy field to enter. Wajam, however, a startup based in Canada, is determined to try to beat Google at its own game. The service integrates its social search tools directly onto the search result pages of Google, Yahoo, Bing and a number of other popular sites. Today, Wajam is launching a big redesign that makes it easier to use and integrates it into even more services.

Wajam is a pretty ambitious project. The company aims to index all the social status updates and links your friends share on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Support for LinkedIn is planned for later this year. Wajam looks at the status updates your friends share, but also crawls and indexes the sites they link to. It then applies its own PageRank-link algorithm to the updates and displays them alongside your regular search results.

Until now, Wajam’s results would appear at the top of Google’s own results, pushing Google’s results down the page. This wasn’t the most elegant solution, so the Wajam team has decided to now show its own results to the right of Google’s links. This update also gives users the option to turn Wajam’s results off by default and just show them on demand. With this update, Wajam now also lets you more easily filter results by social network, category (photo, video, etc.).

For now, the new design only appears on Google’s search result pages. Support for this new design on Bing and Yahoo is coming later this week.

It’s important to note that Wajam goes beyond just integrating its results on these popular search engines, though. One of the new features this update introduces, for example, is a bar that will appear at the top of all the other sites the service supports, including Amazon, Tripadvisor, Wikipedia and many others.

Given that Google’s social search results still feel rather limited these days, Wajam is definitely worth a try if you are looking to see more of your friends’ recommendations on your search result pages and across the web.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, social search, TC, wajam

Wajam’s Updated Social Search Takes On Google’s “Search, Plus Your World”

April 23, 2012 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

For now, the new design only appears on Google’s search result pages. Support for this new design on Bing and Yahoo is coming later this week.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, social search, TC, wajam

Gillmor Gang 7.30.11 (TCTV)

July 30, 2011 by Steve Gillmor Leave a Comment

The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — covered the gamut between Google+ and well, Google+. The new social platform continues to delight and confound the early adopters in record numbers. @scobleizer remains optimistic that the search giant will roll out filtering features to cut down on the noise of squids, kittens, and well, Scoble comment farms.

@dannysullivan would prefer Google unleash the hounds of celebrity and brands, surprised as he and we are that the Plus team was caught flatfooted by the viral adoption of the field trial, or whatever Danny calls it. When we (Danny and I) started complaining about the lack of iPad support and Robert about the perils of high speed Scoble flow via the iPhone, @kevinmarks pointed out the ANdroid support sucked for tablets in general. All in all, much to look forward to and little or no competition from Facebook for Google to worry about.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: @dannysullivan, @kevinmarks, @scobleizer, @stevegillmor, Blogging, Danny Sullivan, Facebook, Gillmor-Gang, Google, iPad2, Kevin Marks, Robert Scoble, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, social search, Steve Gillmor, TC, TCTV

Bing Likes Facebook

October 13, 2010 by Erick Schonfeld Leave a Comment

Today, Facebook and Microsoft deepened their existing relationship around search. At an event in Silicon Valley, both companies announced a new phase in their partnership, especially as it relates to social search. Bing will be adding more Facebook social data into its main search results.

Starting today, if you do a search on Bing, it will try to recognize your Facebook account through instant personalization, and you will automatically start to see links that your friends have “liked.” These will appear in a separate module, with related social links called out. The example Microsoft gives is if you are searching for San Francisco steak houses and one of your friends liked Alexander’s Steakhouse in San Francisco, that would appear as a result along with the name of your friend.

The same thing could happen for movie results or news articles. Not every search will show social results, and when they do show up, the Facebook module will move up and down the page depending on Bing’s ranking algorithms. In the future, these Facebook likes will appear under related links, and not just within a separate module grouping all “liked” results together.

Bing will warn searchers the first few times it starts pulling liked links from their Facebook friends with a pop-up window allowing people to opt-out. You can also disable Bing in your Facebook privacy settings.

Along with adding Facebook likes into search results, Bing is also using Facebook data to do better people search. When you start looking for a person, Bing will analyze the people you know and the people they know through Facebook and return those who are most closely linked to you socially. Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi says that 4 percent of searches are people search, but results are only satisfying 20 percent of the time. He hopes Facebook can improve on that.

Soon, Bing will also looking at social signals on Faceboom to identify experts related to various searches. So when you search for a restuarant, if someone you know has checked in there through Facebook Places or tagged a lot of photos there, or someone you don’t know who has done so publicly, they might show up as an expert.

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