Microsoft"s Bing engine launched a few years ago with hopes of competing against Google in the search marketplace. While the endeavor has slowly been gaining support the general consumer, there is still plenty of work to be done.
To help separate Bing from the other gorilla in the room, Google, the engine has been including social data from Facebook and Klout to help delver a rich experience. With the ability to pull content from multiple social sources, Microsoft is working towards getting you the information you are looking for, faster.
Neowin recently spoke with Stefan Weitz, the Director of Bing Search, who stated that Microsoft receives 2 billion updates a day from Facebook. As you can imagine, not all of these 2 billion datapoints are worthwhile to pair with search queries, so the team has to correctly identify the useful bits of information out of this massive data pull. Importantly, this information is opt in content, Microsoft is not scraping the data and this is all information that has been volunteered by the end user.
For Bing, the Facebook data plays an important role about how Microsoft sees search evolving and to also make the platform offer more than the standard definition of search; more on this in an upcoming post. As Microsoft works to refine this data to help improve the quality of your searches, know that the team is always testing new theories about how to best align this content with traditional searches to provide the user the best experience, possible.