New "Social Search" Bing

Thursday was a big day for Microsoft as it released its brand new Bing format, giving much more relevance to social media sites and bringing "instant answers" to searchers without having to click thru to the website itself.

For social media integration, the "entire right column of Bing?s new three-column search results formant will be given up to social results. The column will feature results from both searcher?s social media connections and search-term-related ?experts? on social media sites." Check out the attached pic of the new results pages.

The instant answers is another new feature. "This new method of search is like bringing instant answers to the entire Web. Weitz says that their goal is to ?model every object on the planet.? He further clarifies by saying that Bing no longer indexes text, but rather associates ?data that exists on the Web in all forms with the physical object that spawned it in the fist place.? The hope is that they can create use this data to create apps that provide instant answers so that users won?t have to click through to a Web page to the find the information they?re looking for. "

More info can be found on Bing's community blog at http://www.bing.com/community/site_b...-new-bing.aspx