Bing and Facebook: A marriage of tech minds

Another day another massive tech announcement, this time between Bing and Facebook…

Last night the tech powerhouses joined forces to announce that Facebook ‘likes’ would be integrated into the search engine, making the internet search experience well, more social.

Its currently being rolled out in the US and users there will now experience much more relevance when they search. Listings will now flag up brands and websites that their Facebook friends like, so if for instance I had flagged that I ‘like’ a hotel in London (let’s face it, I like going away!) then if my friends search for hotels in London the ones I have publicly liked will be flagged up in the search.

The same goes for people search, as this piece from MSNBC explains, if I wanted to search for old colleagues or school friends via Bing it will bring up people with who I have mutual friends or associations with on Facebook. Very clever.

Its further boosted by third party companies now being able to host a Facebook ‘like’ button on their own websites, thus creating a connection with their Facebook profile.

It comes just a couple of weeks after Google’s ‘Instant’ announcement and its fair to say that in following up with something so strongly associated with Facebook Bing are definitely raising their game in the search world.

We’ll report back again once its rolled out here…

An instant hit?

So the highly anticpated Google announcement has finally happened… Yup, the speculation was confirmed and the company has set its sights on time saving search, or what it calls Google Instant.

The news basically means that Google will now show your results as you type. Its innovative and cool and is especially useful if you’ve allowed Google to locate where you are in the world – for example having a location set as ‘Manchester’ and simply typing ‘w’ in the search bar will immediately bring up results for Manchester’s weather.

Aside from being a teensy bit disappointed when watching the conference (I was expecting a multitude of announcements fuelled by a day’s Twitter speculation..!) I am impressed – as it seems are other web users. Real time searching and the longstanding ‘Google Suggest’ are tantamount to mind reading and let’s face it we do all want those Google results as quick as possible. Google’s research claims that on saving users 2-5 seconds they’re saving the global population around 3.5 billion seconds collaboratively!

So what are your thoughts? Has Google raised its game and pioneered another new way of search? Does predicting too soon irritate you as a user? We’d love to hear your thoughts as its rolled out in the coming days…