Back in March of this year, Microsoft kicked off its Bing Spring update…. I thought so, at least. But on June 9, the Softies announced new social search capabilities for Bing and said to expect more revisions soon as part of Bing’s spring update.
Calendar confusion aside, here’s what Microsoft unveiled today at the SMX Advanced show in Seattle.
There’s a new subsite going live today on Bing — bing.com/social — that Microsoft is calling “the first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose with non-pages content.” (Twitter real time content is going to be integrated there, too.) The new social search subsite will detect trending topics and surface top links that are being shared, without making non-Fan-Page content traceable back to an individual user.
Microsoft also is updating its Bing Webmaster Tools later this summer. Microsoft is calling the update a re-engineering from the ground up, and is promising to offer more data, better charting and an improved user interface. The tools will remain Web-based and make use of Silverlight. They will help webmasters monitor performance in crawl, index and traffic.
