Mashups. Everyone seems to think that people love mashups. Not really sure where this came from but we have to live with the consequences. Facebook and the Bing search engine yesterday announced a new mashup, that merges Bing search results with Facebook social information.
The feature which is going to be rolled out in the United States in the coming weeks will show friends’ recommendations on Bing. If you search for top movies you see which friends liked the movies shown in the results.
Today, we’re partnering with Bing to give you a way to bring your friends’ recommendations to online search. Your friends have liked lots of things all over the web, and now instead of stumbling across a new movie or having to look at a friend’s profile to see which restaurants they like, we’re bringing everything together in one place.
When you search for something on Bing or in web results on Facebook (powered by Bing), you’ll be able to see your friends’ faces next to web pages they’ve liked. So, you can lean on friends to figure out the best websites for your search.
Now, I’m not sure if this new “liked by your Facebook friends” integration in Bing is showing up for all kinds of searches, as it could be quite awkward to find out that some of your friend’s like specific adult movies for instance, or weirder things..
It is not clear if the feature will be rolled out to all users, but only available on the Bing US search engine, or only to US users on Bing. Another thing that needs consideration is that it is likely that Facebook users need to be logged in on Facebook to see the recommendations.
Most commenters at the official blog announcement post seem to like the feature, but would have preferred to see a mashup with Google instead of Bing.
What’s your take on the new feature? Is it improving search quality on Bing, or yet another feature that does not really improve it.
My personal concerns are that you may need to be logged in on Facebook to use the feature. Oh yeah, that, and I generally do not listen to my friend’s recommendations anyway, haha. Will there be an option to turn it off? Lets hope so.
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