News - Bing integrates further with Facebook

[HEXUS]

The broader social graph now influences search results and there’s a universal ‘like’ button.

Read more.

[Spud1]

OK so on the off chance that someone from the Bing team is reading this.

Microsoft - you have added many great features to Bing search, thats great.

Now can you please just do two very simple and basic things..

1) Forget the name "Bing" and sack the marketing contractor who came up with it. It's terrible.
2) Redesign the UI to something nice and simple, clean basic. Why do you think people use google? It's not because of superior features or search results, its because its simple to use, clean and easy to look at, and very very usable. This insistence to flood all Bing pages with tonnes of horriblly busy graphics is what turns me and many others away from your search engine. Heck even Yahoo.com is cleaner than bing.com. The home page is the worst, but search results are not much better..atlthough they have improved in the past few months.

You need the basics right before facebook integration or anything else, and no amount of money will fix that.

[cheesemp]

Am I the only one who doesn't get the point of social integration with the web? Sure I like facebook on its own but why would I want share my web browsing habits with everyone? Also why would I want facebook to have even more details regarding my life. For me this social stuff just feels like another marketing bandwagon everyone's jumped on...

[Noxvayl]

One very good point above(point 2), the other I really don't care about.

The one thing I've been a bit wary of recently is the changes in algorithm to adapt searches to individual people. It filters out things it "thinks" you wouldn't like and because of this surrounds you with a "filter bubble".

I prefer having the option to choose what I look at, sometimes random results I'm not really looking for turn out to be the most rewarding. I'd prefer a simpler, universal, ranking system(everyone gets the same results for the same search phrase) and the option to blacklist sites and a +1 button(or like button) to let others know what you think is worthwhile.


@ cheesamp: I prefer the data used in search to be annonamized, I'm also not a fan of data tracking. However I think having the option to view whether people recommend a site is good, it could help reduce the redundant links you go to before finding what you need.

[TooNice]

Am I the only one who doesn't get the point of social integration with the web?

I hate social integration on the web (I don't think I use that word often). It annoys the heck out of the seeing a FB box when I am looking at CNN. Though I now that I think about it, there *is* a way around it. I could just use FB on a secondary browser, and everything else on my primary.