Microsoft adding new social features to Bing

One of the few times that you will find Microsoft as the underdog, Bing is currently fighting segment giant Google for marketshare in the search wars. While Bing entered the game late, Microsoft is quickly adding everything but the kitchen sink to the search platform to help take marketshare away from Google.

The next update to Bing will bring more social features to the platform, that is, according to a blog post by the Bing team. Microsoft claims the new updates will help with making decisions because they can be made with inputs of others, rather than straight facts.

Decisions now can be made not just with facts, but with the opinions of trusted friends and with the collective wisdom of the Web, resulting in smarter, faster decisions. Also available today is the new Bing Bar, which includes the first universal Like button, making it easy for people to like any page on the Web.

Microsoft put together a video of the new feature that explains a bit more about how it works:

There are many other new features which includes Collective IQ. Microsoft states the searching beyond algorithms is important to creating the best search results. They also explain that your friends may not always have the expertise to point you in the right direction. To fill this void, Collective IQ brings the power of the entire Web to the search results.

Collective IQ - It’s not just your friends that can help you out – there’s also value in the larger brain trust of the Web. Bing now brings the collective IQ of people to decision making, when your friends don’t have the right expertise or you’re not sure what you’re looking for. Search is better when it’s not just based in math and algorithms, but also infused with the opinions of people. Input from the collective IQ can enable search to become a discovery tool, allowing you to benefit from the connections, inferences and “likes” of it.

There are many more features that Microsoft has added to the search engine, which you can read here. The end product is that you will be provided with more than machine generated content, but each result will now have a human touch to it. Microsoft explains the marriage between fact and friend in the video below: