Thalasar Ventures

Facebook has swept the world and now, users from all over the world cant get enough of it. From games to finding old friends from college to following the popular celebrities, Facebook is a winner in collecting information. The introduction of Facebook groups allowed users to have more freedom to keep track of their groups including the information of their friends. It even partnered with Skype to materialize Skype services. With this growing popularity, Redmond-based software giant took notice and decided to team up with Facebook. Microsofts search engine Bing is now partners with this social networking site. The news is that these two are set out to bring in more sociability to online search.

What can these two do for the users of Facebook and Bing? You will now be able to see the pages and websites that your friends like when they use a specific search while they are logged into the Social Networking Site. Other than that, when users search for their friends on Bing, it will also show people that are common friends on top of the search results. This service is now available to the United States but the recent blog post on Facebook say that it will eventually be implemented to the other areas around the globe in due time.

So what about seeing what your friends like on the Internet? Isnt it great that at this level, we are getting to know our friends based on the content that they like? It might come in useful when you plan to go out and watch a movie and you have no idea what is the best. Think of it as a review of the different websites and content. You get to see what people like and you get the chance to see if you will like them yourself. You also get to share relevant websites to other friends just by liking them and this puts them in the same level as you are- getting to know you more.

Some were concerned about the privacy of the users but Microsoft and Facebook stressed in their press release that they have taken this into account. This issue was greatly stressed upon by the users of the Social Networking site and the plan to integrate the companies has taken a beating in this subject. The senior vice president of Microsoft online service division stressed that search will now be more personalized and will stand out in a more social level. This is not a way to kill the old traditional methods of search engines but a way of improvement. The head of Microsoft online services division further explained that by adding a social layer to the fixed pattern search, peoples connection to any particular information and their decision making becomes social, personal and more useful.

With the team up of these two giants, the search now becomes more complex, going beyond your traditional keyword matching. At first, there will be two new features that will be added in their search features. The first one is Linked Results and the second is Facebook Profile Search.