Bing's New Social Search a First Tiny Step Toward a Giant Future | Forrester Blogs

Excerpt from Forrester’s take on Bing + Facebook

What we're seeing is nothing less than the re-evolution of search. Back in the dark ages of search (when Google, Yahoo and Microsoft competed with the likes of Dogpile, AltaVista, HotBot and Lycos), results were gathered and ranked based on very few data points, such as page titles and meta data. Those were poor sources for search engine relevance and were prone to being gamed using "Black Hat SEO" tactics, so the back-end of search became ever more complex in order to furnish users with ever more relevant search results.  While today's Bing social search functionality may seem relatively crude, it is just a starting point on a journey toward far more complex parsing of social data into useful, pertinent search results. 

As the ability to convert social data into relevant knowledge improves, so will the value of social search.  After all, what my friends do and think is more important to my information gathering and decisions than what the entire world does and thinks.

Bing's New Social Search a First Tiny Step Toward a Giant Future | Forrester Blogs