Bing gets Social with Facebook

Bing has done a deal with Facebook, and now has near real-time updates from the social networking site integrated into its search engine.

With results from Twitter already fed through to the site (since last October, in fact), Microsoft has stitched a new arm onto its search engine called Bing Social (www.bing.com/social).

Bing Social combines the search results from both Twitter and Facebook streams.

This means you can hop on there and root around directly in Facebook fan page updates, and popular shared links from users in aggregate form.

In other words, while fan page data might be shovelled about freely, popular personal updates will only be published on Bing in aggregate form, and only from Facebook users who have set their content to be shared with everyone.

This is a bow to the mighty privacy Gods, in other words. Or perhaps more of a nod.

Microsoft also noted, on the Bing Community page: “We’re [also] introducing a re-designed homepage that shows improved trending topics derived from both Twitter and Facebook data.”

“For each trending topic, we also show information about why it’s trending, a snippet of results from our social corpus, followed by query refiners on the bottom.”