Microsoft announced it has integrated live feeds from Facebook into its Bing search engine's results, making Bing's social networking ties tighter than ever. Additionally, the company's developers are working on a significant upgrade to the Bing Webmaster tools.
The move comes as Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) continues to roll out new and enhanced search capabilities in what has been referred to as the Bing spring update. Last fall, Microsoft announced plans to include Twitter feeds in Bing search results.
Now, it has extended support to Facebook feeds as well, Microsoft spokesperson Lawrence Kim said in a post to the Bing Community blog Wednesday.
"Today, [we] ... announced bing.com/social -- the first search experience integrating the full Facebook fire hose with non-pages content," Kim's post said. By that he means it integrates the social site's entire data feed.
"In addition to Tweets, we also search through Facebook fan page updates and surface matching results. For example, a search for 'NBA Finals' will return fan-page content from Facebook, including posts from a local TV station," Kim's post continued.
That may provide more opportunities for search advertisers and ecommerce players, conceivably helping Bing gain more market share vis-а-vis other search competitors, particularly Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). Beyond beefing up Bing's social pedigree, however, Microsoft's engineers are also working to make it easier to manage sites.
The company is giving preview demos of some of the new capabilities coming in the free Bing Webmaster Tools for Webmasters and search engine optimizers (SEO), according to a separate post to the Bing Community blog, by Rick DeJarnette, a spokesperson for the Bing Webmaster Center.
In that post, DeJarnette described the main areas that developers are focusing on in updating the Webmaster tools as crawling, indexing, and traffic, but he also pointed out that the tools add a new user interface as well as enhanced charting capabilities.
"A key, new feature to Bing Webmaster Tools is Index Explorer, a tree-view that enables webmasters to see at a glance all of the crawling and index data for their website," DeJarnette said.
In addition, the toolset is adding a feature that lets webmasters send a list of URLs to Bing to be prioritized, the post said.
"URLs submitted through this tool will be recrawled or crawled and added to the index if not already included," DeJarnette added.
Finally, a new Block URLs tool gives Webmasters control over what content to block from search engine results pages, he said.
Microsoft’s updated Bing Webmaster Tools will be available this summer, a company Microsoft spokesperson told InternetNews.com.
Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing writer at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
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