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BING NOW HELPS YOU MAKE DECISIONS WITH YOUR FACEBOOK
FRIENDS
~ New Social Features
Infuse Search with the "Friend Effect" to Enable Smarter
Decisions ~
May 2011
(Redmond, WA) -- Decisions
just got easier with the addition of new social features
to Bing, the decision engine from Microsoft. By bringing
together the power of search and Facebook, people can
now receive personalized search results based on the
opinions of their friends simply by signing into Facebook.
New features make it easy
to see what people's Facebook friends like across the
Web, incorporate the collective IQ of the Web into their
decision-making and conduct conversational searches.
Also available today is the new Bing Bar, which includes
the first universal "Like" button, making it easy for
people to like any page on the Web.
According to a recent survey
conducted by Bing and Impulse Research, 90 percent of
people surveyed seek advice from family and friends
before making decisions. This "friend effect" is apparent
in a majority of decisions and often outweighs other
facts because people feel more confident, smarter and
safer with guidance from their trusted circle.
Today's search engines don't
solve for this phenomenon, and 80 percent of people
surveyed said they will delay making a decision until
they can get a friend's stamp of approval. This decision
delay, or the period of time it takes to hunt down a
friend for advice, can last anywhere from minutes to
days, whether a person is waiting for a call back, text,
email or tweet.
The decision delay can be
shortened by combining the technology of Bing with Facebook,
to incorporate the friend effect into search. Bing now
uses the interests shown by friends on Facebook to deliver
a personalized search experience. With more than 30
billion pieces of content shared each month on Facebook
alone, there is power in the collective know-how of
the Web, and Bing is the first search engine to harness
this information in a useful way.
But it's not just friends
who can help out. There's also value in the larger brain
trust of the Web. Bing now brings the collective IQ
of people to decision-making online when friends may
not have the right expertise or a person may not know
exactly what they're looking for.
Many decisions require a discussion
with friends. By combining Facebook's communication
tools with Bing, search can become conversational- taking
decision-making on Bing from a passive experience to
an active dialogue. The vision of Bing is to combine
the power of discovery with the empowerment of conversation.
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