Microsoft’s Bing search engine is expanding on its collaboration with Facebook by highlighting search results that a search engine user’s Facebook friends have ‘Liked’.

Currently only available in the U.S., the new feature works like this: you type a keyword or keyword phrase into Bing and, if you are logged into Facebook, it highlights those links appearing in the search results that your Facebook friends have visited and ‘Liked’.

Bing isn’t ranking its search results based on Likes but the more Likes a search result has the more, um, likely it may be that you will click on that search result.

Thus, although the social popularity of a web page may not directly help it rank more highly in Bing, it may help to generate more traffic. In other words, it may be that lower-ranked search results with lots of Likes actually attract more clicks and traffic than more highly-ranked, and ostensibly more relevant, search results.

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• Microsoft Announces ‘Bing’ Search Engine

This entry was posted on Monday, December 20th, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Kikabink Lab, Search Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.