SEM: Bing Met Tweet, but Got in Bed with Facebook

The latest storm in the SEO world is the partnership of Bing and Facebook creating a new term 'Social Search' which they announced last week during a press event. The whole internet world witnessed the alliance between two internet marketing practices.

I wrote a similar but diminutive post a while back regarding Bing and Twitter's affair on a social tab on Bing (Query Meets Tweet While Searching) and in comparison to Bing's latest partnership, it can easily be perceived as a mere fling in contrast. Bing and Facebook's alliance could restructure the whole SEO spectrum and generating more room for Social media.

We will start witnessing some of changes caused by the partnership almost straight away, and others in the subsequent weeks and months. Altering the way individuals view search and social networking, was the notion behind this affiliation. Both companies believe conducting a query should be lifted to a more social and personal level.
The mention of two new features 'Facebook Likes' and 'Facebook Profile Search' on the Bing's search engine is the starting effect of this association, which is predicted to be launched imminently. 
The feature 'Facebook Likes' will work by providing results to a user's queries inclusive of their friends 'Likes' using Facebook. Placed at the top of the results page will be sites or link relevant to the query that a user's Facebook friends may have liked.
This concept originate from the belief by Bing that people will trust their affiliates' (friends, family, colleagues) opinions better than a stranger's reviews or a computerised system's results. Additionally, Bing hopes such personal results will attract more or create loyal surfers.
The other feature is to enable user to find people they are searching for easier. A research by Bing on search queries reported that 4% of queries are on seeking individuals; there erupted the notion to design the feature. This feature will work by utilising share network and friends to help users find the correct person's Facebook. In addition, users will be able to see from the search results; the person’s mutual friends, add the person as a friend or message them without leaving the result page.

Clearly these features do raise some issues, whilst reading about this some alarms rang in my head especially in reference to privacy issues. However, conscientious to this, Bing constructed an option to allow users on Facebook to opt out of this enhanced results by disabling it. Additionally those opt-in to the features, their Facebook information will be limited on the results pages, only the information made public by the Facebook user will visual.

Here, Pipon we believe this alliance was established to benefit both Bing and Facebook; by allowing Bing to target Facebook users to their search engine and for Facebook to drive their users to utilises their social media profiles to its full potential as a result empowering the social search, by personalising search results.
However, in more created scale, I feel that this alliance will give social media more power, once established and successfully engaging with its search users. For example, social search could soon influence the sales of products and services.