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Bing Adds 'Like' Button 119

Posted by CmdrTaco from the still-waiting-for-hate-button dept.
Tiek00n wrote in with something that might sound familiar, saying, "Microsoft on Monday expanded its use of Facebook within its Bing search engine, adding 'likes' and recommendations from friends and strangers into search results. Going forward, if you search for something one of your Facebook friends has 'liked,' Bing will note that in its search results. Did your sister and roommate 'like' a nearby Italian restaurant? A small photo, the Facebook 'thumbs up' icon, and a note that said they approve will show up in search results, Microsoft said."
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Bing Adds 'Like' Button More

Bing Adds 'Like' Button

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  • I wonder.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by beowulfcluster ( 603942 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @09:01AM (#36152276)
    ..if my sister and roommate have agreed to let their like thingies be used like this. Unknowingly, obviously, since they'll never know about it.

    • Re:I wonder.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sonny Yatsen ( 603655 ) * on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @09:07AM (#36152336) Journal

      You know, of course, that to Microsoft and Facebook (and pretty much every other major company on the internet that dabbles in social networking), agreeing and knowing are mutually exclusive concepts.

    • It won't matter, especially with scams (Score:4, Funny)

      by Penguinisto ( 415985 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @09:14AM (#36152440) Journal

      I can't wait to see what happens come the next FB scam/spam blitz, now that SEO's have a huge incentive to push a few in their favor.

      Also, for some odd reason I foresee Farmville and other Zynga games at the top of damned near every Bing results page...

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by x*yy*x ( 2058140 )
        They didn't say it affects rankings, only that it will show in the search results.
        • If it is anything like the beta mode of +1 for Google, then it does (modify read:change) the search rankings. When i am logged into a Gmail account and I search for anything. Things, i have +1'd appear on the first page interlaced with the other search rankings as do sites others in my contacts have +1'd. I have to keep logging out to see actual search rankings (without social modifiers). As far as I can tell Bing flat out carbon copies Google's efforts and they will be doing the same. On another note, I

    • Re:I wonder.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @09:23AM (#36152528)
      The vast majority of people on Facebook aren't going to have a clue how this works. They are going to just use Bing and "like" everything they see that looks shiny to them. Unbeknownst to them, their relatives, friends, employers, etc. are going to be privy to all manner of interests that they may prefer to be private yet are too naive to see the connection. Somebody else uses your computer, suddenly you "like" gay midget hamster porn for all your "friends" to see. The potential for abuse and violation is much too high to be any part of this. I for one will recommend to everyone to not use Bing until this is mothballed.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Yvan256 ( 722131 )

        The problem here isn't Bing. It's Facebook.

      • I for one will recommend to everyone to not use Bing until this is mothballed.

        You would be recommending that users not use Bing whether this feature were present or not. Now, if a non Microsoft browser initiated this feature, you would be claiming it was the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel.

        I for one am advising my friends not to use Firefox or Chrome since from the first of this year, they have both been shown to have more exploitable flaws than IE9.

        • You would be recommending that users not use Bing whether this feature were present or not.

          Please remove the tinfoil headwear. You look ridiculous.

  • As Microsoft's search engine share sunk to its lowest level yet in February, with approximately 8 to 9 queries total worldwide, Steve Ballmer has reiterated his willingness to hook up with Yahoo! and its 21 queries worldwide to take on Google.

    The press conference was held on a street corner in San Francisco as Mr Ballmer and Jerry Yang sat with their hats on the sidewalk and playing harmonicas with a "WILL WEBSEARCH FOR FOOD" sign behind them.

    "Understandably, we expect less activity in the Great Recession," said Mr Ballmer. "Nobody knows what value assets should be ... say, you aren't finished with that cigarette, are you?"

    Press attendees included a schizophrenic local resident in a tinfoil hat (“to keep Google out"), two teenagers drunk on malt liquor and a policeman keeping an eye on things from a distance. The teenagers taunted, confused and upset Mr Ballmer by suggesting he attempt to locate his own posterior.

    "My new search technology is unstoppable! Just look at this netbook!" shouted Mr Ballmer, waving an Etch-a-Sketch [newstechnica.com] in a threatening manner. "IT'S MAUVE! IT RUNS WINDOWS SEVEN! LINUX PUT A RADIO IN MY HEAD! I'LL SHOW ’EM ALL! BASTARDS! LIKE! LIKE! "

    "Some love stories are eternal," said Mr Yang. "Romeo and Juliet. Heloise and Abelard. Leopold and Loeb. Microsoft and Yahoo."

    • On Tuesday May 17, @01:17AM, David Gerard opined:
      > Steve Ballmer has reiterated his willingness to hook up with Yahoo!

      Yahoo already hooked-up with Microsoft's Bing 2 years ago. When you look at Yahoo search results, you're really looking at Bing results.

    • Definitely not your best work.

  • My facebook "friends" and I don't like the same things. I like sitting at home playing videogames or watching Free tv or reading Asimov's magazine. Most of them do not.

    Most of them like going out, or looking for child-friendly school related activities, or jogging, or other tasks that hold zero attention for me. Even if they recommended a site (via bing) I'd probably not look at it.

    Nice idea though. I guess someone will find it useful.

  • I don't 'like' it at all (Score:4, Interesting)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @09:03AM (#36152294)
    So where's my 'dislike' icon?

  • I am a curmudgeon (Score:4)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @09:08AM (#36152348) Homepage

    Ok, I am being an old curmudgeon here, but...can we just take all of these social icons littering the web and sweep them into the trashcan?

    • NoScript should do.

    • can we just take all of these social icons littering the web and sweep them into the trashcan?

      And if noscript doesn't cut it (say they are start putting them in bog standard html), just try greasemonkey [wikipedia.org]. Guaranteed or your money back!*

      Not really.

    • nope.... next question?

    • Oh how I wish that were possible.

      Users above have posted solutions to getting rid of the bloody things, but the one I use in FF is a simple rule in adblock plus:

      ||facebook.*$domain=~facebook.com|~127.0.0.1

      This effectively blocks the loading of facebook.com content from any site that isn't actually facebook.com. I've just remembered I set this up ages ago so it should probably also include all the other facebook domains like fbcdn.net and the like.

    • If you use Firefox you can use Adblock Plus to remove all the social media crap.

      http://adblockplus.org/en/subscriptions [adblockplus.org]

      Scroll down to the very bottom and subscribe to the Antisocial filter in the Miscellaneous section.

  • Going forward? Let's try that sentence again with that pointless piece of `office bulls**t` removed:

    > If you search for something one of your Facebook friends has "liked,"
    > Bing will note that in its search results.

    Hmm. It has exactly the same meaning. I wonder if it's possible to construct a sentence such that adding the prefix `going forward` actually modifies the meaning in some way.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gr8_phk ( 621180 )
      While totally off topic. "Going forward" implicitly means "excluding the past" and therefore this is a new thing. This doesn't add much to the conversation going forward, but will easily prevent people from saying "but I didn't see that" because obviously it wasn't there before. And yeah, I did that again for you.

  • The Borg have won (Score:3)

    by Posting=!Working ( 197779 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @09:15AM (#36152450)

    FTFA:
    "Input from the collective IQ can enable search to become a discovery tool"

    Damn, they're not even trying to hide it anymore.

  • And as soon as companies can see this as an advantage to pushing their crap, they'll be all over this in a rash. Where will it end, people?
  • Once again a lumbering corporation proves it's never too late to jump on the bandwagon. You'd think Microsoft was run by actual politicians instead of rich old white men.
  • Alright, so I can know if my sister (or whoever) "likes" a particular restaurant (or whatever) through Bing. But what about the why? Was the service good? How was the food? Are the drinks reasonably priced? And so forth. Absent any of that information, this "addition" is rather useless.
    • its a perfectly cromulent idea, that embiggens the bing search engine

    • Re:Uninformative! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @09:52AM (#36152868) Homepage

      Alright, so I can know if my sister (or whoever) "likes" a particular restaurant (or whatever) through Bing. But what about the why? Was the service good? How was the food? Are the drinks reasonably priced? And so forth. Absent any of that information, this "addition" is rather useless.

      Well, that pretty much sums up the entire fscking "like" button idea.

      I often find myself in Subway seeing the "Like us on Facebook" or whatever the heck the sign says -- near as I can figure, the "Like" button is really only useful for marketing purposes to be able to say "see, we have eleventy million people on Facebook who like us". Who gives a crap?

      It's complete drivel, which is more or less how I feel about Facebook. Seems like half the web pages I go to now have the embedded "friend us on facebook" or "like us facebook" -- there is nothing meaningful, or useful in there, it's just casting your lot in with everyone else to say you like McDonald's or whatever. In fact, I'm sure from a marketing perspective, it's the best thing evar.

      The fact that it's integrated now with Bing ... well, once again, I find myself yawning at the prospect of Bing. Oooh, they've added a Facebook 'Like' button -- that's gonna make me switch search engines.

      Maybe I just got bored with IRC, usenet, and ICQ back in the 90s ... but I gotta say, I just don't 'get' this stuff.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Yvan256 ( 722131 )

        Because the way I see it, when you use IRC, Usenet, ICQ/MSN/etc it's because you need to talk. The technology is there to help you communicate and FaceBook is communication for the sake of communication, i.e. there's no actual information involved.

        Does anyone bother people via phone, email and IM about things they like and dislike, all day long?

        FaceBook is just another way for people to rant about things, just like blogs. Just because everyone is saying something doesn't mean that others are listening.

        Hum,

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by xaxa ( 988988 )

        the "Like" button is really only useful for marketing purposes to be able to say "see, we have eleventy million people on Facebook who like us"

        That's 100% of the intention and purpose of Subway having a Facebook page: marketing.

        A friend has recently been employed by a medium-sized visitor attraction to be a social networking marketer. I think she has to have a Facebook, Twitter etc profile set up to churn out news and updates. Someone at my workplace (a larger visitor attraction) has a similar rôle, although only for a fraction of the time she's employed: "The weather is going to be fantastic this weekend, why not come to XXX? 2 for 1 voucher

      • It's even gotten to the stage where I'm seeing adverts that say "Find us on facebook!" without even giving an honest to god URL. This is, I imagine, because it's much cheaper to rent an end-to-end user-tracking marketing framework from facebook than it is to set up your own on www.hotnewlatestproduct.com and ask all the visitors to supply you with their name, age and a ballpark figure for you annual income. Like another poster said, the sole purpose of facebook is marketing, either of yourself or everyone e

  • Huh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by mcgrew ( 92797 ) * on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @09:29AM (#36152590) Homepage Journal

    Somebody actually uses Bing? Now THAT would be front page news!

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • So what's new? Search engines have been abused since day 1 (in fact since day zero - even before dearch engines existed, when you basically got a list of links, people paid to rank higher). Google managed to bring some common sense back to proceedings for a while, but it seems like it gets gamed as much as anyone else today. I'm not sure how spammers could abuse this, though, other than asking a bunch of users to like their pages (which companies already do, and if it's so overt they should be easily filter

  • Why Bing shouldn't 'Like' Facebook (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Nice comment article about why Facebook's 'Like' button is utterly meaningless here [thinq.co.uk], worth a read.
  • Again Microsoft got it backwards. By Facebook first, then promote it.
    • I assume MS sees an ally in putting Google in their place. As a business tactic you're right, it seems incredibly short sighted (given all the rumblings over the past year that FB might just replace conventional search). It's like someone buying a lion to help them deal with a wolf in their garden - all well and good until the wolf is gone and the lion gets hungry.

  • ... but in recent years I have decided Facebook is even more evil than Microsoft since they seem to be trying to take over the internet a push everyone out. In the Facebook world there won't be anyone else. And they make it easy to get content into their system but they make it very hard if not impossible to get content out. And they want ot make everyone in the world get a Facebook account.

    So it is quite interesting to see that Microsoft has fallen so low that they must kow-tow to Facebook. But I don't

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Yvan256 ( 722131 )

      Why are you even mentioning Bill Gates?

      The real question is: Is Mark Zuckerberg is even more rapacious than Steve Ballmer?

  • Would be nifty if I EVER used bing except when forced to by some app that forced me to open IE and I mistyped something at which point Bing brought up a search page full of all kinds of stuff I might have meant to type when what I was REALLY trying to type was www.google.com

  • people use bing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xyourfacekillerx ( 939258 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @09:57AM (#36152938)
    I use bing, I get better results than google, which the first 10 pages for essentially ANY search these days are links to just computer-generated content, my keyword match being the caption text of some advertisement or worse, not anywhere on the page. Bing filters through all that and gives me the legitimate pages I'm after. Another problem with google, is it won't bother to return results for "old" web pages - even if the site has been indexed, and you can run a query with an EXACT match from within the site's text. There are sites from 2002-2004 I reference all the time in my academic work, they don't need to be updated, so why should the value of their informative content ever expire like Google thinks it should? so when I am using a computer without my bookmarks, I'll never find those sites on google.

    However upon this news, I will no longer be using bing. I want facebook and facebook alone to know that I'm using facebook, if I'm logged into facebook, I don't want bing or any other site to be aware of that.

    • I want facebook and facebook alone to know that I'm using facebook, if I'm logged into facebook, I don't want bing or any other site to be aware of that.

      Nothing has changed in that respect. Sites have always been able to tell if you were on facebook before.

      • Disabling third party cookies breaks all of this. I always see "Sign up to see what your friends like" even when actually logged into Facebook in another tab.

        I've yet to find a downside to this either.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tgd ( 2822 )

      If you're logged into Facebook, almost any site can be aware of it.

      Bing requires not only logging into facebook but granting Bing permission to access your profile. If you don't do that, you've got nothing to lose.

      That said, if you're okay with the astronomical amount of data that Facebook keeps on you, I'm puzzled why you think giving Bing a small feed into it to make your searches better is a problem?

    • If you aren't already filtering out queries to Facebook from your browser, then everything and its pig know you you use Facebook, how many friends you have, and more. The facebook integration with Bing isn't a matter of "Hey, revolutionary new idea: let's check whether you have a Facebook account whenever you use Bing!" but more of "since you never sign out of Facebook anyhow, we might as well use that info you're handing out to every site that queries Facebook to improve your search results."

      Personally, I

  • ... isn't the internet, and especially social networks and search engines, becoming something worse than communism, where eveveryone's life, not just their properties, belongs to everybody?

    People, in their Internet-aholism, seem to care less and less about their privacy. Are we regressing on some level?

    But what's even more amazing is that this seemingly endless source of revenue makes people think it actually enhances their lives, whereas the added value to their lives is doubtful, at best.

    The Economist t

  • When Facebook goes the way of MySpace and Friendster, the Bing results will look incredibly dated and dumb.

    Oh, but don't let me stop you, Microsoft. Please go right ahead. :-)

  • According to a video on this issue on moveon.org I saw yesterday, this potentially could become a problem.

    The gist of the video: If you choose to like certain search results (news/politics), won't that block you from seeing "the other side" in a 2-sided debate? If all you do is like conservative-leaning news sources, and the more liberal-leaning news sources are filtered out, how are you ever going to have an objective view of the world? Shouldn't we be the "gatekeepers" of what we want to read, not search

    • From what I can tell, this isn't about filtering or ranking your results, it's just about sharing virtual word of mouth about sites, if you will. So you search for a particular TV and you get the exact same page of results you would have got before, but one of the sites you've not heard of has a few recommendations from people in your friends list. You can rely on their "liking" the site, or maybe go talk to them about their experience before you risk parting with money. From that point of view it sounds li

  • The other shoe falls (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dagmar d'Surreal ( 5939 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @10:32AM (#36153398) Journal
    Well... I guess this explains why it was that Facebook was trying to chum the waters about Google's social search features--because they were planning on partnering with Bing to do the exact same thing with social searches.

  • Microsoft owns at least 20% of Facebook... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by johnthorensen ( 539527 ) on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @11:09AM (#36153898)
    Citation [nytimes.com]

    I've never understood why this situation doesn't garner more attention in all the debates about either Microsoft or Facebook. I'm not saying that MS owning part of FB is a bad thing or a good thing, it just amazes me that it's not brought up in conspiracy theories about FB privacy, or in stories about Microsoft's 'decline', or whatever...

    Even TFA doesn't mention this *in a story about MS integrating FB features into Bing*. Instead, it just says something about Google not going there because they're slinging mud back and forth with FB.

  • If there's anything that could make BING creepy, it's Facebook integration.

  • ... Going Forward... /me throws up

  • Bing keeps faithfully replicating Google's bad ideas. When Google merged "places" data from the map search engine into web search results, Bing immediately followed. Google search quality went way down as their "places" system was heavily spammed. Bing had the same problem. Google de-emphasized Places results, but that was subtle and Bing didn't pick up on it. So, right now, Bing's results are about where Google was at their low point in late 2010.

    Now Google adds "like" (but not "hate" or "sucks" or "s

  • Eli Pariser's recent TED talk [youtube.com] states Google does this too, except instead of clicking a like button, it just assumes you like what you click on.

  • Let's rename Bing... Boogle !

  • "Asian ass porn". Would you like to look up "Asain ass porn" too?

    (This isn't going to work)

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