So my blog post this week is admittedly a little late, but I’m kinda glad for that, because today an article was posted on Mashable about how Facebook is teaming up with search engine Bing. With this partnership, Bing search results will now include things that your friends have “liked” on Facebook, where applicable. For example: if you’re searching for local movies, and a lot of your friends liked “The Social Network”, then your search results will have a little box saying “___ of your friends liked this movie!”
As we just covered in class, around 70% of consumers trust peer reviews of products over any other form of review. My only problem is I don’t see a huge point to this. If I care enough about Facebook integrating with Bing (which, admittedly, I don’t use), it prolly means I check Facebook often enough to know when my friends like something or post about it. When I search for “local movies” or “Iron Man”, I’m prolly searching for more specific data, like movie times or what year the movie was produced to settle a debate, etc etc. If I want to know what my friends recommend, I’ll go to Facebook. I don’t really want my search results cluttered with my friends opinions on it.
Moreover, I have several people on my Facebook who are clients, professional acquaintances, and the like. I don’t really agree with their opinion, and honestly, in some cases I don’t really care to hear it. I don’t want those popping up on my search results, because I just don’t care. I know Bing has this huge thing about “personalizing the search” and “making the search more human”, but I guess I just use my search differently. What about other people? Does this seem useful to you?
7 Comments
I see it being more irritating than useful. Based off how I see Facebook used on other sites, like Gizmodo, and the examples they gave in the article, seeing who all liked something would just be in the way. “‘So and so’ and ‘So and so’ like this”.. doesn’t mean I should care.
I would be more tempted to care if it created a statistic from my facebook friends list and said “80% of your friends like Iron Man”. It would be a simple statement that wasn’t cluttering up my search with pictures of friends. It would also provide something new that Facebook doesn’t already provide; or at least doesn’t provide without downloading some sort of strange app.
…I don’t really care what percentage of my friends like it…again, I have enough friends whose opinion I don’t really care about. That stat isn’t relevant to me, and as more people use Facebook to connect networks other than their friends, I think that stat will be less relevant to others as well
You wrote, “I don’t really want my search results cluttered with my friends opinions on it.” I couldn’t agree more. Facebook is for Facebook, search engines are for searching. Do you ever fear that some things are becoming too socially interactive with each other?
I like that you recognize that this post has the tone of a rant, Mary. Your challenge is to channel those ranting energies out into larger questions. What does it mean that Facebook is attempting to now integrate with the most basic of knowledge tools – the search engine?
I’m honestly not certain what Facebook really gains from this. The whole idea behind this is that people already use Facebook. I doubt people will go so far out of their way to make a Facebook to see if friends like things when they search.
This sounds pretty interesting, and I’m curious how much people will want it in their search results. I think if I was wondering about a movie etc., I might find it useful to have which friends liked it because that might influence whether or not I’d want to look into it further (depending on which friends). Personally though, I think it’s just another way that Bing is using to try to beat out Google.
Facebook is trying to complete with Google and Microsoft is just trying to stay relevant. I’m not sure how this partnership will work because I don’t think these two are really friends so much as they have a common enemy. I don’t want my search engine hooked up to my facebook. I don’t want my facebook to be my only web destination like Zuckerburgs wants it to be. I like having some things completely separate and i don’t see why Zuckerburg can’t see this as a good thing. If I wanted it all connected, Google has made attempts at this already and it didn’t work, why would it work when he tries it?