Bing Broadens Facebook Integration

Microsoft says that the option that uses recent Facebook activity around some of Bing's search results has recently expanded to include all URLs.

The company announced the expansion in a blog post today, saying that this integration was just "part of a longer journey," and that it played a big role in the company's efforts to add a social layer to its results, as it did with Twitter.

"This is the first time in human history that people are leaving social traces that machines can read and learn from, and present enhanced online experiences based on those traces," Lawrence Kim, the principal program manager for social search, said in a post on the Bing Team blog. "As people spend more time online and integrate their offline and online worlds, they will want their friends' social activity and their social data to help them in making better decisions."

The new broader Bing feature looks at links that show up in its search results to see if Facebook friends have "liked" that specific URL.

Microsoft (News - Alert) first announced the launch of the new and improved social features in October of last year, at a press conference attended by Bing execs, and Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg (News - Alert).

The company employed the features to the U.S. users three weeks after this first announcement.

Just last week, Google unveiled a feature that uses search results to take advantage of data from Facebook (News - Alert), Twitter and other major social networks- in order to show links that have been shared by other users.

This exclusive feature is currently only available to U.S. users of Bing, the company said.