This past week on October 13th at the Microsoft’s Mountain View campus the announcement came that Bing and Facebook were making a significant expansion of their partnership. Bing’s new ‘Liked Results’ will tie into people’s FaceBook friends and present results that were ‘liked’ by friends and actually move the ‘liked’ results higher toward the top of the search results.
The following is an example of the Liked Results for a restaurant search.
The question now is whether people will actually like Bing enough to switch from Google. There are many posts on the Internet that make the argument that they do not want their search results influenced by their friends likes. Many people have hundreds of contacts on FaceBook and they may not be interested in all their ‘likes.’ People have also expressed that they do not want their search results influenced by what is relatively a small community of FaceBook friends. Even with these arguments and others with security and privacy concerns I think this type of search is going to gain a lot of momentum and popularity soon.
The reality that is that people are social creatures and we have a strong desire to feel to connected to others. Presenting the Likes in the search results will increase this sense of connection and community. For example, in searching for a restaurant I might be greatly influenced by what my foodie friends like and by eating at these establishments I will create a new sense of ‘shared experience’ with these individuals. Another example might be something as simply reading a business article that your boss liked giving the reader a strengthened sense of connection and possibly providing openings for future conversations with the boss on the topic. Ultimately this desire for community, especially in today’s youth, will win out and people will come to expect this type of social feedback in their search results.
Sources:
No comments:
Post a Comment