Bing And Facebook Say Game On To Google's Personalized Search

Rene LeMerle Expert Author Published: 2012-03-01 WebProNews RSS Feed

As posted on the Microsoft blog

Whether it's an old friend, a former classmate or even you, searching for people is one of the most common things we do on the web. With people search being such a high volume pastime, we're taking it a step further letting you have more control in how you show up on Bing. Beginning today, with Linked Pages, we're letting you link websites related to you in search results.

And Bing has bought on a big ally to help make Linked Pages popular, users needs to be logged into Facebook in order to use this feature. Microsoft will ask users to allow Bing permission to post from their Facebook ID.Once logged in, you can add links to you home towns, schools, employers, personal websites, organizations or even "just sites you like" just make sure you click on the ‘Link to Me' button. Once granted access, Bing will post on users Facebook Timeline pages that they were linked on Bing.

How is this different from Google's Search Plus Your World? Well, unlike Google, you get to control your privacy on Bing. You can easily un-link such results by following the link notification from Facebook or go to bing.com/linkedpages to remove links you added or links your friends added about you.

This is not Microsoft's first step towards integrating more social media content and context into their searches. In Oct 2010 Microsoft allowed Facebook posts to be fed into Bing search results based on the opinions of "friends" on the dominant social network. Then in May 2011, the software giant tied up a deal with Facebook that allowed Bing users to receive personalized search results "based on the opinions of their friends" through their Facebook accounts.

Now we fast-forward to February 2012 and ‘Linked Pages' seems to be set to give Google some tough competition.