Microsoft’s dogged competitor to Google Search, Bing, will be receiving a fairly radical redesign in the coming days, which includes a whole new section of “social search” results — stuff posted by a user’s friends on social networks that are related to the user’s search query of the moment.
The social search component, called Sidebar, pulls in information from a variety of social networks, including Facebook (into which Microsoft has a substantial investment), Twitter, Foursquare, even competitor Google Plus. Users can also comment directly on their friends’ content in the Sidebar itself.
Microsoft reportedly received help from Facebook engineers and advice from Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the new social search component, according to CNET.
Watch a video on the new Bing here:
