Microsoft Upgrades Bing With Social Sharing

[Guest]

Microsoft's "little engine that could" has received a Facebook update.

Microsoft Upgrades Bing With Social Sharing : Read more

 

[killerclick]

Really, would this be useful to anyone? Metacritic+Wikipedia beat the totality of my friends on any topic.

 

[Marfig]

>> Microsoft says that the reason for the integration of the social feed is because we like to ask our friends for their opinion before we make a decision.

Who's we exactly? Who are these people who want to ask a friend for advise before hitting a search result link? Damn me if I ever heard of them.

 

[djscribbles]

Microsoft has a social network? I hope they aren't talking about that windows live thing that nobody uses for anything ever...

 

[Marfig]

The real problem I have with this is feature is it being tagged as innovation by this article, Douglas.

I'd really like a bit more care in the use of this word, particularly when it comes to a technological website. Frankly, innovation isn't the thing that comes to mind when adding already known features to a search engine (like social web features). I think of Lego pieces, of plaster, or a house annex if you will. Not innovation.

Innovation would be, for instance, to change the way results are presented to us. More and more the current uncategorized (vertical shopping list) web search results is becoming cumbersome. I'd like to hit "King Kong" on a search engine and this resulting in a categorized list of results, separating films, from sports or songs.

Innovation is what Blekko is trying to do, for instance. Or the defunct Cuil tried to do. Innovation isn't grabbing Lego pieces and making a castle. It's creating new Lego pieces or do things for which Lego pieces weren't designed for.

 

[monsta]

Thats why they canned Live from MSN messenger, to move thier Facebook copy over to their failing search.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Doesn't matter. Bing will never surpass Google. Bing is a crapy search engine.

 

[yahee71]

look at all the love the company that revolutionized the computing industry,is getting,HATERS make Microsoft

 

[cybrcatter]

Damn you adblock.

Why din't you block this 'article'?

 

[asterisx]

A majority of PC users are non-enthusiasts or non-technical and use IE which has bing as default search engine. I guess that's where bing gets its traffic. A lot of them don't even know what's Firefox or Chrome. I know such people are minority but still the volume is significant.

 

[SmileyTPB1]

How is this an upgrade if so few people actually use Bing in the first place?

 

[xerroz]

[citation][nom]asterisx[/nom]A majority of PC users are non-enthusiasts or non-technical and use IE which has bing as default search engine. I guess that's where bing gets its traffic. A lot of them don't even know what's Firefox or Chrome. I know such people are minority but still the volume is significant.[/citation]
Or the reason Google is dominating the market is because it comes as default in Firefox and Chrome and pretty much every free software installs Chrome and sets your homepage to some page that does searches on Google. Non-enthusiasts and non-technicals have no clue there's a button to uncheck, they just click next next finish.

It's not a bad search engine, I personally think it's better because my results are within the top 5 links where as with Google I've often had to go over the second page. And that's with the same search.

 

[wiyosaya]

I won't find the integration useful. I don't use facebook, and I highly doubt I ever will. I hope Bing leaves a path for those of us who could care less about social integration. With it, Bing may turn into a useless engine. I've been using Bing since its start as it has offered results that were actually useful to me in that they actually related to what I was looking for and were not a bunch of results that were as a result of business having paid to have their results in the top of those returned.

However, my fear is that this will change the focus of the results returned, and that Bing, for me, will fall into the realm of returning mediocre search results at the cost of cashing in on what is left of FB's 15-minutes of fame.

As it stands, I have adblock set to deny anything coming from facebook as facebook's reach is to harvest information on many sites that have "like" buttons.