Bing upgrades draw upon Facebook, other partners

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Posted: 12/15/2010 09:06:30 PM PSTUpdated: 12/15/2010 09:06:31 PM PST
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Microsoft is hoping its Bing search engine can gain more ground on Google with a little more help from Facebook and its other Internet friends.

As part of an extensive upgrade announced Wednesday, Bing will feature more recommendations and other information from people's social circles on Facebook to help distinguish its results from Google's.

Bing also is teaming up with several other Internet companies to make it easier to complete a variety of tasks, such as buying tickets to a sporting event or making reservations as a restaurant, on its site.

The changes, which will start appearing during the next few weeks, are unlikely to shift the balance of power in the lucrative search market any time soon. Google ended November with a 66 percent share of the U.S. search market while Bing remained a distant third at just under 12 percent, according to research firm comScore. Bing recently started to power Yahoo's U.S. search engine, whose 16 percent share ranks second to Google.

Despite the huge gap, Microsoft has been encouraged by the progress it has made since it retooled its search engine and rebranded it as Bing in June 2009. Bing has about 90 million regular users now, up from 27 million when it made its debut, according to Satya Nadella, a senior vice president in Microsoft's online services division.

Some of the new features unveiled Wednesday provided a glimpse at how Microsoft hopes to capitalize

on a competitive advantage that it gained in October when Facebook agreed to give Bing greater access to the 500 million people who have set up accounts on its social network

Google still isn't able to compile the same volume of Facebook information in its search index. Microsoft has been chummy with Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, since it paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the privately held company three years ago.

Microsoft believes its Facebook relationship will become an increasingly important factor in the search market as people realize how helpful it is to see the recommendations of their friends when they're looking for information on the Web. The breadth of those recommendations is rapidly growing as people spend more time on Facebook and become more comfortable sharing their preferences.

In one upcoming change, if you are searching on Bing while signed into your Facebook account, some of the links listed in the results might include a notation showing that one of your Facebook friends liked the website or product.

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