Late last year Google began integrating real-time data from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace into its search engine, hoping to make the results more useful to users.
On Wednesday, Bing announced it planned to do the same thing, pulling in data from Facebook to enhance its search results. Erick Schonfeld reports that Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked about Bing’s strategy during an earnings call today and said Google planned to be even more social than it already was:
“Schmidt’s response essentially is that the Google search algorithm will absorb more realtime and social data over time: ‘With respect to social and realtime, we use complex signals to do ranking. Over time we will add realtime and social cues.’ Some of this comes in the form of direct data feeds, such as Google gets from Twitter. But to really be social, search needs to be personalized to each individual’s own social stream.”
Schonfeld writes that one way Google might optimize its social-powered results would be to encourage users to share more information with the search giant, and to be logged into Google when performing searches.
