Google, Bing getting social about search

The distinctions between social media engagement and search engine optimisation have gaining increasingly blurred with both Microsoft and Google striking deals with social media giants this week in a flurry of announcements last week.

Googling tweets

Google has announced a tie up with Twitter to allow access to the volumes of data posted every minute.  However this is not just about including tweets in search results. The links that appear in tweets can help the search engine quickly identify the hottest new content from all around the web, which can then be used to help rank regular search results.

From the Official Google Blog:

"Real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.

We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months."

At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Google's  Marissa Myers also demonstrated a new Social Search feature set to be launched on Google Labs. Social will show you results connected to your social networks. At the bottom of the search page, you’ll see results, blog posts, photos or reviews created by friends.

But not so fast, Social Search is based on Google Friend Connect, and this doesn't include Facebook, so for most people its not going to be very useful at all unless you have a lot of friends in your networks linked to your Google Profile. You will also have to fill out your Google Profile and link your social networks, which might just be a bridge too far for most users.

For Google this is a big step, but with Microsoft pulling out all stops, including a US$100million marketing campaign, to promote Bing as a viable alternative.

Bing Bounds into social

Compared to the announcements from Bing, Google looks like it is playing catch up. Bing will not only integrate tweets into its search results, it already has it's twitter search up and running at bing.com/twitter. As usual a lot of Bing features don't work in antipodean regions and you will have to set your region to US to check it out.

Bing's Twitter search features both the most recent tweets, and the hottest links on Twitter surrounding that keyword. It's a novel representation and much better than Bing's previous attempt at integrating twitter which felt exceeedingly clunky.

But that's only the half of it, the real intersting announcement came as Microsoft announced that it will essentially be cashing in on it's investment in Facebook. Bing will soon feature public Facebook status updates in search results.

Before you get all heated about Facebook exposing your information, this will explicitly be for updates that are marked to be shared with everyone. Whilst Facebook's Zuckerburg has admitted he would like people to share their status with everyone, the strength of the social networking site's success has been the ability for a safe, private conversation to take place.

However this is great news for those of you using Facebook as a promotional tool. All the public statuses from your fan page (and now groups) will be indexed by Bing.

However there may be more to Facebook and Bing's sultry dance than meets the eye. There is a possibility that Bing will eventually allowed to used anonymised aggregate data to be used to rank search results. That is if Facebook will allow any of this data to go to search engines at all. With 40 million status updates a day,

With Microsoft's investment in Facebook, Bing is likely to to be first cab off the rank, with the opportunity for Facebook and Bing to share technologies with Bing already powering Facebook's web search.

All in all this is not great news for Google. Despite having a seemingly unassailable lead in the lucrative search business, Bing has been showing the market leader a thing or two about innovation with interface improvements and a willingness to try new ideas. Something that was sorely lacking with Microsoft's previous attempts at search.

If Bing can further utilise the social search power of Twitter and Facebook to get better results than Google it may be able to erode the lead that it is currently having a lot of trouble eating into. With the Yahoo/Bing integration just around the corner, Microsoft's expensive power play may have found the chink in Google's armour. It appears that Microsoft's US$240 million Facebook investment will block Google's access to the social networks data, a situation that may eventually damage Google's dominance in search.