Bing Friends Facebook

By Ryan Singel via @Wired

Microsoft's online head Qi Lu and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg discussing their new partnership Wednesday. Credit: Ryan Singel/Wired.com

Microsoft’s search engine Bing made friends with Facebook Wednesday, an integration that poses a new challenge to the companies’ shared rival Google, which has struggled to build software that connects users socially.

“This is going to show how search gets better through your friends,” Microsoft VP Yusef Mehdi said onstage at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, in remarks prefacing the announcement.

Bing is already embedded inside Facebook to let users search the web without visiting a search site. Facebook has also been feeding data out to Bing, letting Bing users search public Facebook postings at bing.com/social. Microsoft also owns a small sliver of Facebook, and has long worked closely with the upstart social network.

But on Wednesday, Bing’s main search box went social, with embedded “Likes” from your Facebook friends showing up in search results.

So for example, if you search on “Motorola Droid,” you will see a search module in the main results that shows related links that your friends have shared on Facebook that are about that phone.

If you search on a movie, the module will show which of your friends have liked that movie. For people search, Microsoft looks through your Facebook profile and people close to your social graph to help determine which “Jeff Smith” you are likely searching for.

That integration shows that Microsoft is getting inside Facebook’s data and is able to see conversations that aren’t easily seen by search engines, something that Google has recently complained about.

However, the search results won’t include any data that’s not set to “public” by a user.

The new features go live on Bing Wednesday afternoon. Users will see the features by simply showing up logged into their Facebook account — the controversial Instant Personalization — or by logging in with their Facebook credentials. Microsoft says users can block the personalization, and will be notified about how to opt out with a box on the search results screens the first five times they visit.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to call the Bing partnership one of the most important ones the company had made, and said Facebook likes partnering with underdogs that understand social.

“Over the next five years, we expect nearly every industry will be disrupted by new applications that are deeply social,” Zuckerberg said, clearly having Google in mind.

“We started thinking what would social search look like, and we started looking around for partners,” Zuckerberg said. “Microsoft really is the underdog here and they really are incentivized to try new things.”

“They are just trying to rapidly gain share by doing new stuff that no one has done before,” Zuckerberg said, adding that search was something Facebook has no interest in doing itself. That might be the first time Facebook has said it wasn’t interested in building its own Google-killer.

Both Microsoft and Facebook were careful to repeatedly stress that this release was just the beginning of figuring out how to pair the information in social networks with a search engine’s complex algorithms, clearly trying to play down expectations that the new social search would be an immediate Google-killer.

When asked if the feature could look into private conversations and groups, Zuckerberg said there’s no philosophical objection, so long as a user gives Bing that permission.

“For the first version, we focussed on not getting extra information,” Zuckerberg said. He noted, however, that the Groups product introduced last week to allow small, private group conversations also has an API that would allow such an integration into search results.

The announcement of the pairing comes as Google readies its own social effort — reportedly dubbed Google Me — that will attempt to stitch together Google’s communication and search software into a cohesive social whole.

Social search will help when people are deciding what to do in a town they are visiting or deciding whether to see a movie, according to Mehdi.

“The recommendations are coming from people that like you,” Mehdi said.

“We see the web going far beyond a web of documents to a web of the world,” said Microsoft’s president of online services Qi Lu. ”The social graph enables our users to access and discover information and complete tasks more efficiently.”

“We will be able to harness and unlock the power of Facebook’s platform and take search to the next level,” Qi added. “This is just the beginning of how people can become first-class citizens of a search experience.”

“Look at all the queries you made over the last month and ask yourself  ’Can the experience be much better if all the people in your Facebook social graph were able to help?” Qi said. “A substantial number of queries will be much, much better.”