There’s been some interesting social news from both Bing and Google recently…
Bing have been looking at Facebook and have discovered that 90% of people look for advice from their family and friends and this friend effect heavily influences our purchasing decisions. (I see this lots of times when women are talking to me about shoes and handbags). They call it the Friend effect and they’ve incorporated this into social searches – to make your searches more relevant. Here’s an example I’ve just snipped. You need to log into Facebook on one tab and change your location in Bing to United States to get this feature by the way.
As your friends like links, then they will appear on your bing results page.
Google on the other hand, have released their social search results globally. I’ve just had a quick look at recent Tweets sharing links from my stream and entered them into Google. Here are the results shown on Google …
whereas Bing have a Twitter stream constantly updating – and results from everyone discussing the Tornado – again from the bing.com site – where my preferences are set to be United States. This is the live stream from the News tab
Googles social results are relevant to you when you sign in to your Google account, with Bing, you can either sign in – or connect to yor Facebook account. Both will add a great dimension to your search results and give you great personalisation.
Come on Bing – roll this out globally – and Google – let me sign in with Facebook. Why should I HAVE to use my google account. OAuth is ok you know…