Bing Wave 2: A Move to Social Search
As mentioned in a previous post, Microsoft now has a partnership with Twitter and Facebook, allowing it to access status updates and display them in Bing’s search results. The announcement was made yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco by Qi Lu, the President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group. The move was introduced by Lu as the foundation of ‘Bing Wave 2’. The overall product is still quite vague but has been referred to as a move towards “Bing Social Search” by Danny Sullivan. What we do know already is that Bing has released ‘Bing Twitter’ in beta. Here’s how it looks:
As you can see Bing has sorted the results into two categories, Tweets and Shared Links.
Most Recent Tweets
Bing has decided to display the most recent real time results first. As you can see above the last four tweets about a subject are displayed with the ability so ‘See more Tweets about…’ After clicking on the see more link, you are then faced with a larger selection of the most recent tweets, and the option of viewing either ‘Most Recent’ or ‘Best Match’.
The best match option offers a ranked set of tweets based on Bing’s Twitter algorithm. The Bing community blog mentions that, “Here we arrange Tweets differently. If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower.” Overall the ranking factors will be based on estimated authority (followers), number of retweets the tweet has, and freshness of the tweet. The one drawback of ‘best match’ would be that it takes slightly longer to rank, order and display than ‘most recent’ and will therefore display results that are slightly older.
Top Links Shared
This section of results displays the most Tweeted links about the subject. Based on how recently and how many times the link was shared, they are ordered along with the two latest tweets about them. The user can then either click directly on the link or click to see more Tweets about the link.
From here the user also has the option of choosing most recent or best match tweets, based on the same ranking factors mentioned above.
Overall, I think this is a great addition to Bing’s arsenal. With the recent launch of Bing visual search, this useful addition of real time data, and the future implementation of Facebook status updates, Bing is without doubt becoming more social. One thing that would be nice to see is more integration of all of these new search features. Why not display them on the Bing navigation bar to allow for easy manoeuvring between all of the facets.
Naturally Google is keeping pace and has also announced a deal with twitter, as well as the future launch of Google Social Search. The evolvement of search towards a more social experience now seems natural and imminent. One has to wonder how much this will favour Facebook, and it’s possible rise as a major search player.
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