Bing, Google Social Search

This is going to be huge and really I cannot see why it has taken them so long to do it.

About 6 months ago I was searching for something on Google and I suddenly got frustrated that their was no social element to the results.  When you are searching for something to buy on Ebay you have a rating of how good people are, when you are searching for a video on YouTube you can see how many views the video has got etc.  Then on Facebook for ‘pages’ to like you can see which of your friends are ‘liking’ which pages.  It only makes sense to transfer this to normal search.  I.e when you search for Mens Shoes next to each search result will appear a little message telling you how many of your Facebook friends like this site.  This is really powerful and has worked really well to grow brands on Facebook.

The first step of getting social search going was Facebook opening up the ‘Facebook Like’ to get this available for every page on the internet.  With this kind of data starting to take shape it was only a matter of time before somebody did something with it.  Bing announced this very thing earlier this week and you can read about it here – http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2010/11/02/search-blog-bing-s-new-social-search-features-arrive-today.aspx (OK its only the USA at the moment but it will hit us in the UK and New Zealand shortly).

Ok but what about Google, surely they are not going to sit back and let Bing take search away from them?  No of course not and they announced their own approach too.  Google has been working on social search since 2009 but they only really anounced something major today – you can read about this here – http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/05/social-search-goes-global.html