Could Facebook and Bing replicate ‘Search Plus Your World’

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January 16th, 2012 by Rory

Over the last week or so we have seen a lot of comment from the search engine optimisation community about Google’s recent ‘Search Plus Your World‘ (SPYW) update. Certain features of the update have been applauded, including the ease with which users can now find both privately shared content from friends or family, along with public web content through a single search, rather than multiple searches on different platforms. However, while there are undoubtedly positive features of SPYW, the most prevalent piece of criticism is that Google is now unfairly favouring Google Plus over the other social networks. This can be argued effectively, but I’d like to cover that in a separate more focused blog. In today’s post, I’d like to focus on the possibility of Facebook and Bing exploiting their partnership to create their own version of SPYW.

Bing logo

Bing currently has a partnership with Facebook that allows them to use data that is publically shared through Facebook to personalise the results they show to signed-in users. This is similar to how Google are now leveraging Google+ data into their SERPs, and because of the aforementioned partnership between Bing and Facebook, they could theoretically recreate this. This is something Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land briefly mentioned in a blog post covering the launch of ‘Search Plus You World’, but I’d like to go into a bit more detail.

How would Facebook and Bing integration work on this scale?

Facebook is arguably one of the largest depositories of private information on the web, but as I briefly mentioned, only information that is publically shared can be used to personalise the Bing SERPs. This allows a lot of scope for expansion, or at least deeper mining of Facebook’s data by Bing, who are in a position to tap into one of the richest sources of information that could be used to personalise search results in the world today. However, Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World’ update has left them under the scrutiny of the FTC after they had been reported for anti-competitive behaviour, and this could potentially happen to Bing or Facebook if they choose to go down a similar path.

The move could potentially increase Bing’s search engine market share, because of the popularity of Facebook. Conversely, if this was integrated into Facebook, it would help to cement their position as King of social media. While this observation is just based on speculation, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter, and whether you think this could be a potential move for Bing and Facebook? What do you think the results would be for internet marketing on a broader scale? Please feel free to comment with your thoughts.

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