Mashable’s Samantha Murphy has an interesting article on “Why We’re in the Early Days of Social Search“. She correctly notes that we haven’t seen anything yet from social search. While I personally use Google about 90% of the time. I find that I hit twitter about 5% of the time for very specific searches that involve more trend types of information. What I found very interesting was her description of Bing’s approach to social search
For example, Bing has been an innovator with social search. In fact, it was the first search engine to incorporate Facebook and Twitter into its core results.
“What we saw from customer research and feedback was that people were a bit overwhelmed at first with social results, so we wanted to make it easier for them to navigate and get the information they wanted,” says Lisa Gurry, senior director at Bing.
In May, Bing redesigned it social search strategy by pulling people from your social networks of search results and placing them in a dedicated social column via Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn integration. For example, when doing a search for the TV show Breaking Bad, it now pulls up your Facebook friends who like the show, as well as relevant blogs and even the Twitter accounts of some of the cast members.
Bing Search with Social
Link through to the rest of the article for a deeper dive and a cool video of what Google does to personalize it’s search using info from your gmail for example.
