Stronger social signals: Bing team is working hard to provide more social signals by integrating data from Facebook and Twitter to compete with Google+ new feature “Search Plus Your World” (SPYW)

Bing has been keeping a low profile to avoid retaliation while Google+ launched a new feature which is known as “Search Plus Your World” (SPYW) in the second week of January 2012.  Bing added social signals into its search results almost 1 ½ years ago by integrating data from Facebook and Twitter.  The world’s largest search engine mines its own dataset to power Google+ search results with SPYW, while the big pockets Bing’s parent must pay Facebook and Twitter to get those social data.  With a ton of money, everything is possible for Bing, as the “Doing Engine” is now the only search engine in the planet that has exclusive deals to access all type of social data from both Facebook and Twitter.

Early today, Liz Gannes of All Things D published an article as she interviewed Bing Director Stefan Weitz.  Based on the interview, it appears that Bing team is working really hard to add stronger social signals into the “Doing Engine” soon. 

While the progress has been slow as Weitz said in the article “…we are taking this pretty slow, and there’s a pretty good reason for that,” Bing team sees a significant impact into the division’s bottom line.  Citing Stefan Weitz, in fact by incorporating social signal into search results has helped Bing the get more users to click on links including pay-per-click ads, as Gannes wrote “…the click-through rate goes up substantially.”