From today, Microsoft’s Bing is adding aggregated links from Facebook users to bing.com/social. This means that in addition to the indexing of Tweets, users searching with this facility will see links from Facebook indexed, too.
Bing will search Facebook fan pages, and return fan page content. But it will also index non-fan page popular links. This information will only be collected from Facebook users who have chosen in their privacy settings to share their status updates with everyone, and no information other than the popular link itself will be shared. This means no photos of users or their names will be published, and none of the text from the updates associated with the link will be indexed either.
Search Marketing
This is the first time that the full firehose of updates from Facebook has been incorporated in a search engine, and is Bing’s attempt to gain further share on the search marketing market, which Google dominates. Google has had competition from not only other search engines in recent times, but from social media itself, in particular when news landed that visits to Facebook.com had overtaken visits to Google.com.
Figures like this indicate that the web is increasingly used more for social rather than search purposes, with search marketing creeping further towards the former each day. Bing’s social addition highlights the importance of social media as part of any search marketer’s long-term strategy.
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