Microsoft and Facebook are set to announce some major new changes to Bing, including some big integrations between the world’s largest social network and Microsoft’s search engine.
We are here live at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley headquarters in Mountain View for today announcement. The room is filled with press, Bing’s development team and a large contingent of the Facebook PR team. They’ve been cooking something up, and we’re about to find out what.
Could today’s Bing announcements be related to the rumor that Bing will integrate Facebook “like” data into search? What about Bing’s major HTML5 makeover that was announced at last month’s IE9 event? What else does Facebook have up its sleeve?
Here are my live notes:
Bing + Facebook — Live Notes
All times are in Pacific Standard Time
11:40 AM: Mark Zuckerberg just arrived. Bing is introducing us to the program for today’s event.
11:41: Discussion about how important the Facebook partnership has been. Bing is laying down the love on Facebook.
11:43: Bing is discussing ways to utilize the social graph to “change the way Bing accomplishes tasks.”
11:44: Qi Lu, Microsoft’s head of digital and search, is on stage. He is discussing how Bing can fundamentally help the user get things done.
11:45: Currently search is about keywords and search results, but does it have to be that way? Are there better ways to help consumers better discover the web?
11:46: The goal is to help users accomplish tasks faster, make decisions better.
11:47: What’s the connective tissue of the web? Now Lu is discussing anchor text and its importance to search algorithms and figuring out what you’re looking for sites. “But if you go beyond looking for a person or a product, the experience really varies.” The search engine doesn’t have enough predictive powers to figure out user queries.
11:48: The web has evolved from a web of documents to a web of the world. Digital representations of people, places etc. now exist in the structure of the web.
11:49: Topical graph and social graphs: the “like” button overlays a person and interests and sets the beginning of making the structure richer. This is something that the search engine can tap into. It can complete tasks more efficiently. “We’ll be able to harness and unlock the power of social.”
11:50: This is really the beginning. This is about making people first-class citizens of search. A lot of this Qi Lu’s talk is high level about Big’s overarching goals and the long-term vision, along with history of what’s been done in search already and where it’s currently weak.
11:51: By Bing and Facebook working together will make Bing incredibly better. We will be in a position to tackle that type of problem over time.
11:52: “The experience will be much, much better.” Lu is talking about the integration of social data into Bing. Making the experience substantially better is the key theme of his talk.
11:54: Mark Zuckerberg is on stage.
11:54: Zuck is going back to when Facebook got started. “From studying psychology, I knew that a huge amount of people’s brains is focused entirely on processing information about people.” Emotions, expressions etc. This is the most interesting information that people track around the world — it’s hard wired into us.
11:55: Facebook Photos and Groups were made by just 2-3 people. They couldn’t build the most feature-rich applications, but early on they only had one advantage — they were deeply, socially integrated. You weren’t just posting photos, but you were tagging people in photos.
11:56: We decided in 2007 that we wanted to focus on building a platform. It’s about giving people with different expertises the ability to build of Facebook.
11:58: Games was one of the first areas that really leveraged the platform. Zynga and Playfish get shout-outs. Games are an early indicator of what’s possible.
11:59: 7 million users at the time when Microsoft and Facebook partnership was started. Search, ads, maps and more partnerships have occurred since then. “What’s made Microsoft a great partner because they really are the underdogs here.” It compels them to innovate is Zuck’s point.
12:01: We’ve seen good results on ads, Facebook search with Bing and more. Zuck couldn’t think of a better partner to work with for creating the next generation of search.
Live Video
More About: bing, facebook, microsoft, Search
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