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Bing Adds Social Results to Search

March 22, 2013

By Gilbert Falso :: 7:17 AM

Search engine adds social results.Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, is spicing up its search results page for people searches with the help of social media data.

If you search for a person on Bing now, the search engine will also scour LinkedIn for their profile, and bring it up along the right-hand side of the search results if it finds a match. If there is no corresponding social profile for a person, Bing tries to bring up a Wikipedia entry, if one exists. In addition to the social profile, there are also shortcut links to that person’s various social media accounts.

In addition to people, the box on the right, referred to by Bing as the “Snapshot Box” will also work for geographic place searches.

Microsoft’s Richard Qian, lead developer on the Bing search team, released this statement on a blog post:

“Since its introduction in June, we have expanded Satori to include a significantly larger number of entities from more domains with a deeper level of understanding about them. They include people, places, and things which are among the most common searches on Bing. So, whether you’re searching for answers about a celebrity, co-worker, animal, geographic location, or man-made structure, Bing helps you understand the world around you by providing at-a-glance answers about the people, places, and things you care about.”

This is not Bing’s first foray into expanding search results with social media data. The search engine has also entered into a partnership with Facebook to provide the search results on all of the social network’s people searches, and has pulled Facebook profiles into Bing search results.

Screenshot below shows how Bing results include LinkedIn data – in this case, the search was for Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley. Yellow shading is added to show location of Snapshot Box, but does not normally appear on Bing’s search results.

Bing social results example - Dennis Crowley.