Bing search engine is now introducing a search interface that offers social search results in a separate column to the right of the search results, Microsoft said on Thursday.
During a press demonstration at Microsoft's San Francisco offices Bing representatives described the new interface,
"We're moving beyond the pages into entities. Those entities are people, places, things and their relationships," said Qi Lu, Microsoft's president of online services."In the real world that's how it works: We use search, then we talk to people," Lu said.
Using the new interface, query results for seafood restaurants in Dublin city center, for example, include a grey column along the side that displays a 'people you know who may know' section, with content on the subject shared by the searcher's social network connections, and a 'people who know' section that highlights experts on the topic you searched for across networks across social networks.
You can add your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ with the new social side bar. The company expects to bring in LinkedIn, Quora and Foursquare as well. You can interact with Facebook directly from the social sidebar. For instance, you can post a question about a restaurant and tag one of your friends who may have commented on it. The resulting Facebook posts include a link back to Bing's search page. Twitter interactions take the user to a Twitter interface, the company said.
A center 'snapshot' column allows you to interact with businesses from the search page. If you search for seafood restaurants and hover on a link to a particular restaurant, the column pops up, offering a map, available reservations and links to reviews. Integration with OpenTable.com allows you to make reservations without leaving the search page.
The 'people who know' section of the sidebar will explicitly rank people by their expertise in a particular area. Company representatives reiterated numerous times how difficult a task that is, but emphasized that the social content will continue to improve over time.
"The experience won't be perfect, but the most important thing is that we make the leap and then the feedback cycle begins," Lu said.
Bing is also unsure as to how well the interface will work on a smartphone. The company previewed a "stacked" display of the links, snapshot and social sidebar for a mobile screen, but indicated that it expected to move to an interface that relies more on swiping.
Microsoft officials did not give a timeframe for the public beta release of the new interface, saying that it would be available "very soon."
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