Microsoft's New Bing Design Brings Facebook Friends to Search
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Microsoft is going social with the latest rollout of its search engine Bing that makes Facebook its key component.
Microsoft is touting Bing's newly redesigned interface as a way "to save time and get things done more quickly." By using the social aspect of the search to find more relevant results, Bing could get an edge over Google search.
The latest version of Bing, which will begin to roll out next week, will be break up search results in three-columns.
Traditional web results will appear in the first column; the middle column will be called "snapshot" and will be designed to assist users in completing tasks; the third column, called "sidebar," will display search results based off the user's social networks.
The "sidebar" will aggregate information from Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn and FourSquare. Basically, the sidebar will pull in information from the social networks from friends or experts who have shared information that is relative to the user's search.
A user searching a travel destination may get results that include a travel blogger's tweets that are relevant or results from a friend who has posted on Facebook about traveling to that location. The user can also directly post a question through Bing to Facebook, and people in their network can respond on Facebook or through Bing.
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