Social media has conquered the search engine world. Microsoft and Google both announced plans to incorporate social media into their search engine platforms at last week’s Web 2.0 Summit, intensifying the rivalry between the two search engine giants. Microsoft has signed non-exclusive deals with Twitter and Facebook, allowing Bing to provide users with real-time status updates from the world’s top two social media services. A beta version of Bing’s Twitter search is already available. The new service enables users to view a group of the latest trending Twitter topics, along with shared links relevant to the most popular tweets. Bing’s Twitter search also features a search box where users can enter search terms and see results containing the most recent related tweets and most popular shared links. Although details of Microsoft’s partnership with Facebook are not yet public, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg stated that Facebook will allow Bing to index Facebook status updates. However, Bing will only display status updates from users who have public profile settings.
Google has also unveiled plans to capitalize on the growing popularity of social media. Launched yesterday as a Google Labs experiment, Google Social Search indexes information from Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa, Blogger, and Google Reader. Google Social Search is different from Bing’s social media services in that search results include content compiled from contacts in users’ social networks. For instance, a user’s search for “Superbowl” could yield FriendFeed or Blogger entries and Gmail messages about the Superbowl from the user’s friends. Where does Google obtain information about a user’s social network? According to Google’s Matt Cutts, Google Social Search leverages users’ social circles. These social circles are created using a Google Public Profile. Users list their social networking profiles on their Google Public Profile, which signals Google Social Search to extract information from those networks. The Google Public Profile allows Google Social Search to dig deeper, creating extended social circles and serving up content from friends of friends as well.
