In October, Bing received access to the Twitter “firehose” and launched a specialized Twitter search site at bing.com/twitter. Now, a new search portal is launching, Bing Social Search, available at bing.com/social, and it will feature both Twitter posts and publicly available Facebook posts too.
Described as the “first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose,” the new search engine will retrieve both fan page updates and links plus links from individual Facebook users whose updates are set to “Everyone.”
However, unlike other standalone Facebook search engines, user names and photos from Facebook users will not be displayed, and neither will the text included the status update. In fact, the only thing that will be retrieved is the link itself, in aggregate. It’s a nice way to retrieve the data from Facebook, without violating user privacy.
The Bing homepage is also being tweaked now too to show the “trending topics” based on both the Twitter and Facebook data. When you click on a topic, you’re shown info about why it’s trending, results from social search and then query refiners.
These changes will roll out starting today, June 9th.
http://www.bing.com/social
Tags: bing, FaceBook, social, Social networks, social web, Twitter
