Microsoft's latest Bing feature lets users associate pages from around the Web with their name. Bing continues to trail Google in the search-engine wars.
Microsoft has
introduced a way to make people stand out more clearly on Bing, its search
engine.
A new Linked
Pages feature lets users associate pages from around the Web with their name,
allowing others to tell the difference between, say, five different John Does.
With Linked Pages, were letting you link Websites related to you by search
results, read a Feb. 22 note on the
Bing
Community blog. Now your friends looking for you online can find what
you want them to find. You can also link pages to your friends helping them
shine on Bing as well.
Users who want
to take advantage of the feature will need to log in via their Facebook ID and
give Bing permission to post to Facebook. Users can also remove posted links.
Once you remove a link, you are the only person that can go back and relink
yourself to that page, the posting added.
Facebook and
Bing have something of a symbiotic relationship, with the social networks
Like button appearing in the latters search results. In addition, Bing also
offers up Facebook information as part of its results. For example, Bing can
notify users of airfare deals to places theyve Liked on Facebook, and lets
users post Bing Shopping Pages on their Facebook wall.
Decisions
dont get made on rationality alone, Bing director Stefan Weitz told
eWEEK in 2011. People ask other people
for information. Eighty percent of the people making a purchase online will
delay that decision until they ask someone else.
Despite that
focus on social search, Bing continues to trail Google in the overall search
market by a significant margin. In order to help close that gap, Microsoft has
entered into search-related agreements with other companies in addition to
Facebook. Bing now powers Yahoos back-end search, for example, which
essentially doubles Microsofts overall search-engine market share.
But Google has
been making moves of its own. In November, the search-engine giant tweaked its
algorithm, with an eye to improving search results and better competing with
the floods of data from Facebook and Twitter. It is also devoting significant
resources to its Google+ social network, whose data has likewise begun to
appear in Google search results.
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