It seems as if Bing is branching out their search engine to social networks; just recently, they decided to have their search engine revamped for a better overall user experience. On the left side of their search results, people will see relevant results of whatever topic they were looking up. In the middle column, people will see possible actions or tasks associated with whatever you were searching. Microsoft refers to this middle column as the “snapshot.” An example of this would be if you were looking up a certain city, then you could pull up a map of that particular city in the middle column. Finally, on the far right column, you will be able to see what your friends think of whatever you searched. If you searched for the best restaurants in the city, then it would pop up with what some of your Facebook friends thought the best dining places were. It’s new Facebook integrations like this that makes services like buying Facebook likes seem more and more valuable.
It’s too early to tell what the overall user consensus is of this revamped interface, but so far the reviews have all been fairly positive. People really enjoy being able to see right off the bat what their friends on Facebook think about the topic of their search. They may not have to end up going to an actual website to find their information if they see their friends input. This is obviously a great relationship that Bing has built with Facebook, and the popularity should really only take off from here.
If you have any questions, then you are able to post them directly to your Facebook using the right side of the menu. From there, you can only hope that you get a quick response from one of your friends on Facebook. Let’s say that you are looking up some things to do in New York City. You will obviously search something in Bing along the lines of “things to do in New York City.” From there, you will see a list of websites that you can go to offering things that you can do in New York City; you can click on one of those websites and see what their opinion is. From there, you can go back and use the right side of the menu to ask a question about whichever places you found. For example, if going to a baseball game was one of the results from your search, you could post a question on Facebook asking if the Yankees were playing at home that night. From there, you could get a quick response from one of your friends saying whether they were home or not.
The only real downside of this new revamped search engine is that it seems a bit cluttered, although people probably will get used to it over time. The cool thing is this is something that no other search engine has done before; it is completely unique! This will certainly draw more attention, and you have to wonder where Bing and Facebook go from here. This is definitely another big step for social networking.