In fact, Bing is now the only search engine that has explicit deals to access data from both Facebook and Twitter.

But it’s not like Bing is the all-social, all-the-time search engine. In fact, Bing has been oddly reticent about incorporating social data into its results, especially considering that Twitter and Facebook themselves have relatively poor search offerings.

This morning I asked Bing Search director Stefan Weitz what the deal was. Here’s an edited write-up of our conversation.

Liz Gannes: What’s the status of social search at Bing?

Stefan Weitz: We’ve been blending social signals for 18 months now, even just to do things like detecting possible spikes when we see lots of tweets coming in on a certain topic. And we have a separate SERP — a separate page — where you can see social results.

The first thing is, we are taking this pretty slow, and there’s a pretty good reason for that. People don’t understand how amazingly complex it is to make sense of any social signal. So we are being very conservative about where we fire social results.

That’s the first thing; the second thing is there’s more than likes and shares. It’s more about augmenting this mechanical product — the algorithmic search engine — with people. So we shipped things like understanding the cities where you live, friends’ opinions on stock quotes — a bunch of things besides just firing off social search.

Do you think it makes sense for search engines to pay to access social data?

I’m not on the business side, but I think for search to work properly, you have to understand that if a missing component has to be included, you have to [make a deal for] it.

Has social search positively impacted the Bing experience? Are there measurable impacts of social users being more satisfied with their results?

For sure — the biggest thing we see is when you look on the search page and see the faces [of your friends], the click-through rate goes up substantially. It goes back to basic neuroscience: We pay attention to people. The core user experience has gotten a ton better, and it’s very early. We’ve taken a while to do this, but it’s complex.

What in particular is complex?

Figuring out what does a “Like” mean, what does a share mean. Originally we were going to fire off “Stefan likes this result” even if there’s a comment. But what if I say in the comment, “This article’s totally wrong.” On one hand I have the “Like,” on the other hand I have the lexical comment. Or I might be retweeting it from someone else, or I might have just thought it was funny. Trying to understand that very atomic action is hard.

Bing's Stefan Weitz says search is better with faces.

We’ve found it’s important to look at the whole person and understand “Stefan likes to share on computer science, and he has an interest in spatial dynamics.” On Twitter search we will identify experts on a certain topic. That’s something we can do but we don’t do that on any scale yet.

Why aren’t you doing more to capitalize on the goodwill from people who dislike Google’s Search Plus Your World? Shouldn’t you be mounting a “switch to Bing” campaign?

We are doing some ads this week (There was also a Bing-is-great blog post today). They [Google] are doing a nice job on their own of handling this problem.

But they are learning just like we are. They did what we didn’t want to do, which was make the user experience peppered with this stuff, with +1s everywhere, the Google+ content in the top corner. I think [Google] realized we were ahead and they overextended. But I know a ton of guys there and they’re smart and they’re reacting to what has been said.

What would happen if Microsoft had its own significant social network? How would that change your relationship to other social networking sites? Would you be tempted to give preference to your own on-network content?

Well, we do have Windows Live, which has half a billion accounts — though not a lot of social activity because we have linked to 25 or 40 other social network profiles for years.

I remember the discussion a few years ago that, even though we had a very robust social product, there were 60+ social networks across the planet. We thought, it’s naive to assume a single social network will rule them all or to make people come to ours. So we have the guys running around doing partnerships with 60 different networks.

Us partnering is the only way we’re going to make a big difference here. We have to use the whole web to actualize our vision of helping people do stuff, not just find stuff. And everyone wins, which is nice.

Can you explain what you get through these deals? What information is accessible through data feeds that isn’t through regular crawling?

Just from a technical standpoint, crawling is expensive. We could certainly hit a site a thousand times a minute, but it’s not efficient. Feeds just generally are more efficient. And also crawling doesn’t necessarily have a structured data set.

What about getting access to analyze each user’s social graph, something Google has said is very important?

Certainly having a social graph is a good thing for Facebook, which has an amazing amount of data. There’s also people I follow on Twitter, which is a public record. But different friends are valuable for different things — one single network can’t rule them all.

When are you going to press your social advantage in Bing, seeing as you have both Facebook and Twitter deals and Google doesn’t?

You’re going to see the culmination of a lot of our learnings in the not too distant future. All those lessons will be applied into something that I think is pretty interesting. How we think about social is always evolving, and the next turn of the crank is more differentiated than we’ve seen in the past.

Nerd fight!

Blake Ross

A weekend coding effort, led by Facebook rabble-rouser Blake Ross, gave birth to a browser bookmarklet called “don’t be evil” that rewrites Google’s personalized search results to include content from other social networks. (Ross’s official title is Director of Product, and he was previously a co-founder of Firefox.)

Ross said engineers from Twitter and Myspace also helped out with the bookmarklet, but he didn’t name them. The group launched a Web site today, at focusontheuser.org.

This gets slightly complicated, but you can install the bookmarklet yourself in Chrome, Firefox and Safari, or watch a video about how it works. After you do a normal Google search with personalized results turned on, you can click on the bookmarklet to get an updated version of the results that includes links to Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, CrunchBase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, GitHub and Google+.

I ran into a bunch of hiccups when I tried the bookmarklet out in Chrome, but it worked pretty smoothly in Firefox.

Here’s the background: A couple of weeks ago, when it launched “Search plus Your World” by default for English-language users, Google said that other social networks like Facebook and Twitter don’t let it crawl deeply enough to provide “secure and consistent access” to their users’ private content. So, SPYW could, for the most part, only include Google+ content.

That’s a bit of a ruse, because there’s lots of public content from social networks that Google already indexes. It’s not hard to find Twitter handles and LinkedIn profiles in Google search results. When SPYW launched, Twitter loudly called foul, and people at Facebook complained more quietly.

The thing is, SPYW doesn’t just give preference to private Google+ content in personalized search results. It also actively promotes Google+ profiles and other public content in various locations throughout the search page.

Google+ profiles — but not content from any other social network — now show up in a new “People and Pages” box that sometimes appears in place of ads on the right side of Google’s search-results page, as a type-ahead suggested query within the search box, and interspersed high up in search results for many brands.

Ross and his buddies used Google’s own organic search results and “Rich Snippets” tool to find the social network content that Google already indexes and ranks normally. The bookmarklet then integrates those diverse results into places where Google+ content is exclusively promoted.

This was an independent and unofficial effort, but Facebook is hardly disavowing it. In fact, a Facebook spokesman praised Ross’s voice-over talent (that’s him speaking in the video) in an email to AllThingsD.

While this feistiness makes for a fun story, the moral high ground might be a dangerous spot for Ross to claim.

Facebook notoriously hoards its members’ friend graphs and user emails, doling out access only to partners that it doesn’t see as direct competitors. Users who wish to remove and transport their data to another service are stifled at every turn.

Further, Facebook limits access to search engines, having required Microsoft’s Bing to sign a deal to access content that’s mostly public already. And it’s not like the company provides its own democratic search engine to compete with Google.

(Photo credit: Flickr user StampyTurtle)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Public records now show the buyer was Google.

So yes, indeed, there is a body of social search intellectual property — around things like user-driven ranking of Web pages and a distributed file system — that three companies have the rights to use: Google, Facebook and the virtually unknown start-up Jildy.

Last week Jildy released its very first product: An iPhone app for clustering and sorting Facebook friends and status updates.

It’s kind of similar to Katango, a friend-sorting app that Google recently bought for an undisclosed sum.

The Jildy interface is rudimentary and so far only includes Facebook data, but it already provides some interesting tools to those who want to slice and dice their social streams.

Jildy gives users tools to monitor four types of lists:

1. keyword-based searches of their friends’ status messages that they can set up manually
2. algorithmically created lists of friends who are friends with each other (this is like what Katango did, but Jildy users can both read and write to the lists of people)
3. demographically created lists, like male friends and female friends, or San Francisco friends and New York friends
4. any lists that users have already created on Facebook

Then, Jildy tries to find out the top five to seven people or topics within each of those lists, so a user can quickly dive in and see what’s happened recently.

In the next couple of weeks, Jildy plans to add notifications. So for instance, said Jildy’s Mark Drummond (the co-founder and former CEO of Wowd), a user could be alerted every time a friend mentions a term like “skiing,” “snowboarding” or “Tahoe,” the better to facilitate serendipitous meet-ups on the slopes.

Other upcoming additions should include Twitter and LinkedIn data. Drummond said he also thinks it’s important to help users edit their friend lists to stay updated as social circles change.

On a larger note, the patent wars that plague the mobile device industry haven’t crept into social networking yet, aside from a few defensive buys throughout the years, like the Friendster portfolio (now owned by Facebook) and the Six Degrees patent (bought by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Zynga’s Mark Pincus, when Pincus was at Tribe.net).

But all the interest in the Wowd patent portfolio — which, to be clear, has not yet been used to build a successful social search product — shows that giants like Facebook and Google are attentively shoring up access to intellectual property in case social patent wars do break out.

It’s kind of ironic (and maybe even a good thing, if you don’t like software patents) that the two rivals have rights to use the very same technology from the same defunct start-up.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Jildy has seven employees and $650,000 from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and KPG Ventures. To be specific, it has non-exclusive licenses to three awarded patents and six patent applications from Wowd, and owns three more Wowd patents. Drummond said Wowd is in the process of becoming a liquidating trust.

Photo of Mark Drummond by James Duncan Davidson for the Web 2.0 Summit 2009, where Wowd was first announced.

Topsy’s co-founder and now former CEO, Vipul Ved Prakash, will remain the company’s main technical guru while he becomes CTO, and will run platform and product engineering.

Greatwood’s job will be to scale the company up, which sounds like it will be interesting. I talked with Greatwood and Prakash yesterday, which was Greatwood’s first day on the job.

With so much social data being created on Facebook and Twitter and so many other places, Topsy was built to index it all and make it searchable, and analyze it. “There’s a lot of exhaust that’s being created around analyzing social data that applies to so many businesses, from finance to publishing,” Prakash told me.

Greatwood said that what attracted him to Topsy was the fact that it’s a lot more than a search or analytics engine. “It really lets you extract some deep analytics information from a broad array of data sources,” he said. Think about all the time and effort a company devotes to analyzing who and how many people visit its Web site using products like Google Analytics or Adobe’s Omniture. “At the same time there are probably lots of conversations taking place about that company or just conversations that company would be interested in,” Greatwood says.

Sales are starting to take off, Greatwood says, and though the customer base is small right now, there’s a great deal of interest from the marketplace. “We have a small number of customers, but within that group there’s some very big customers, and they’re driving an acceleration of sales over the past few months.” He wouldn’t divulge many customer names, but one that’s already been disclosed is AOL’s Huffington Post. The plan is to take Topsy’s products to a broader market during the year.

Topsy raised $15 million in a Series C round led by BlueRun Ventures in March with prior investors Western Technology Investments, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund and Scott Banister, the founder of Ironport, participating. Its total capital raised so far is about $30 million.

Allon’s thesis research was acquired by Google in 2006 and was later implemented as suggested related searches on Google’s main search results pages. He left Google last year to start Julpan.

Julpan specialized in analyzing how topics gain steam on Twitter. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Julpan had raised money from a single investor, a Twitter representative said. Its products will be taken offline as it is incorporated into Twitter, she added.

Allon said in a post on the news, “With more than 230 million Tweets per day on every subject imaginable, Twitter gives us a chance to make an even greater contribution toward instantly bringing people closer to what is most meaningful to them. We look forward to joining forces with Twitter’s engineering team to explore how we can best integrate and optimize Julpan’s innovations.”

In a rare joint public appearance, the four men dove deeply into the big issues facing search at a Churchill Club event last week.

For instance, Singhal fended off Eli Pariser’s “filter bubble” critique, the idea that online personalization presents a skewed view of the world that leaves out important things like opposing viewpoints.

Singhal said that personalization is a big factor in Google results for some queries, like restaurants, but not at all for others, like banks. “Our algorithms are tremendously balanced to give a mix of what you want and what the world says you should at least know,” he said.

There wasn’t a ton of discussion of Google+ and social, but Singhal affirmed Google plans to revive its recently closed real-time search feature, and said that “who knows who and who knows what” can be a powerful combination of signals about what information is important.

So if you search on Bing for a city while logged into Facebook, you’ll see which of your friends live there or lived there in the past. Or if you search for a publication like Us Weekly, you’ll see which articles your friends and Facebook users in general have liked or shared. And if you visit a page that doesn’t offer the Facebook “Like” button, you can share it with your Facebook feed by “Liking” it using the Bing toolbar for Internet Explorer.

Amping up its Facebook partnership is a distinct advantage Bing has over search rival Google, whose relationship with Facebook is strained, to put it mildly.

In a video interview at Microsoft’s San Francisco office, Bing Director Stefan Weitz explained a bit more about how Bing is increasing both the supply and demand for Facebook “Likes,” discussed why Bing treats Facebook as a proxy for social, and waved his hands around a lot (literally).

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110517/microsofts-stefan-weitz-explains-bings-facebook-obsession-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110330/google-gets-a-like-button-users-can-recommend-search-results-with-1/ http://allthingsd.com/20110330/google-gets-a-like-button-users-can-recommend-search-results-with-1/#comments Wed, 30 Mar 2011 17:46:09 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4973 Google today will start rolling out a social search feature it is calling +1. The product is much more limited than sharing tools from other services like Facebook, Twitter and Delicious, but since it will influence Google search results, it’s significant.

The basic +1 function allows users to recommend a Web page by clicking on a small +1 button next to search results. These votes are aggregated globally, but logged-in users will see the pictures and names of their connections who have “+1′ed” a link.

Just as with Facebook’s “like” button, all +1′s are public. But +1 doesn’t have the social feedback you might get by sharing a link on Facebook or Twitter, or the option to annotate links with your comments.

This is only rolling out gradually, though users can opt in to try +1 at www.google.com/experimental. It’s part of a larger effort to get Google users to start maintaining their Google Profiles–which are obviously key to the grand Google social plan.

For now, users can choose to make their +1′s available as a tab on their Google Profile, but there’s no activity stream that brings together friends’ likes.

Another limitation: right now +1 is only for users’ connections on Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Reader and Google Buzz. Support for connections on other services like Twitter is “coming soon.”

Yet another feature coming soon: +1 buttons for publishers, which they can add alongside the other colorful doodads for sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, and perhaps even Google Buzz.

One feature that’s ready at launch is +1 for ads, a highly unusual move in Silicon Valley where monetization is usually relegated to a lower priority. +1 buttons will appear next to Google ads and show which users have clicked on them, just like +1 for search. Advertisers don’t have to pay for the feature but will get reporting on how many +1s they get.

Google already has multiple social search features currently rolled out, and has experimented with users voting on search results in the past through tools like Google SearchWiki (which is no longer available).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110330/google-gets-a-like-button-users-can-recommend-search-results-with-1/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110324/facebook-redesigns-questions-product-around-friends-advice/ http://allthingsd.com/20110324/facebook-redesigns-questions-product-around-friends-advice/#comments Thu, 24 Mar 2011 19:55:57 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4787 Facebook today relaunched its Questions product, which had been in a limited beta since last summer. The product now focuses on asking for friends’ opinions and recommendations, with answers ordered in a poll format. It is much more of a social search tool than before, when the product seemed a Quora-style aggregator of knowledge and expert opinions.

The new Questions has been built to spread throughout networks of friends, unlike the last version, which was only available to pockets of beta testers. Users can still ask open-ended questions on the service if they want to, but Facebook will mostly highlight requests for advice from friends in users’ feeds.

All questions are still public, and answers by all users to the same question are listed on the same page. However, each user gets a personalized view of the responses, ranked by what their friends voted. Respondents only have to check a box to participate in the poll themselves, and information about a movie or restaurant can be quickly included by linking to its Facebook page.

The current version of Facebook Questions is much more differentiated from Quora than the previous one, which had in many ways resembled the Q&A site founded by former Facebookers. In fact, Quora explicitly disallows polls.

The original Questions had a particularly rocky product launch, with lots of initial bugginess and a slow roll-out.

The new version is to be available much more broadly (though right now available only in English), Facebook said. Users can get access to the beta by opting in at Facebook.com/questions.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110324/facebook-redesigns-questions-product-around-friends-advice/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110308/googles-approach-to-social-it-wants-to-find-the-one-true-you/ http://allthingsd.com/20110308/googles-approach-to-social-it-wants-to-find-the-one-true-you/#comments Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:57:54 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4052 For Google, social search hinges (somewhat ironically) on isolating people. The company attempts to figure out who a single user is by cross-checking friend maps across Google Chat and public connections on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Quora. Then it uses that understanding of a person to prioritize relevant information that was originated or shared by someone in their network.

The emphasis on identity aggregation is an interesting indicator of how Google approaches social as it rolls out further products on that front in the next few months.

Though I’d heard Director of Search Product Management Mike Cassidy describe Google’s approach to social search when the company started sprinkling it throughout search results last month, this particular angle was increasingly apparent at a panel on social signals in search where Cassidy spoke at the Search Marketing Expo in San Jose today.

“We actually do try to map one true person,” Cassidy said. “The more we can do to associate content to a person, the better,” he added, calling this “AuthorRank.”

Cassidy appeared with Microsoft’s Paul Yiu, principal group program manager for Bing Social. Both are currently conducting tests on social search within the U.S. that they said are going well and should expand elsewhere “soon.”

“We measure everything at Google, and the results are all we hoped for,” said Cassidy of click-throughs on the new social search features. Social, he said, is “a great signal and people are using and enjoying it.” (That’s in contrast to another search expert at Google who earlier this year called social “a tiny signal.”)

What would a social story be without some Google-Facebook awkwardness? Cassidy avoided mentioning Facebook even as he discussed aggregating the Web’s social signals. It turns out Google social search does not include Facebook data, even though its intent is to include all publicly crawlable social data. (Facebook fan pages do show up in normal Google search, but they are not given special social ranking.)

Cassidy maintained that the omission is not because of ongoing tension between the companies about personal data sharing. Rather, he said, it’s a “technical issue” that will be resolved soon.

Unlike Bing, which provides some social results (for instance, heavily tweeted links) for logged-out users, Google shows social search only for users who are logged in to its own network. Bing’s big social signal is Facebook, and it automatically detects Facebook users who are logged in. From what Yiu said, it sounds like Bing is trying to find authorities on certain topics on Twitter rather than analyze the social graph there, as Google does.

But Bing is also connecting the social dots between various versions of an entity. One interesting thing that Bing has started doing is associating a company’s latest official tweet with its name. So, for instance, if you search for Netflix on Bing right now, you’ll see a tweet from yesterday about Mardi Gras as part of the top entry about the company.

Also, though search engines are usually reticent to disclose specific factors in their algorithm, Liu said Bing has found a high correlation between quality tweets and tweets that contain links.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110308/googles-approach-to-social-it-wants-to-find-the-one-true-you/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091027/google-social-search/ http://allthingsd.com/20091027/google-social-search/#comments Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:14:22 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=27556 On the heels of its deal to incorporate Twitter data into its search results, Google on Monday announced an experimental Labs feature that searches the social Web. Called Google Social Search, the new offering is intended to make search results more relevant by enhancing them with personalized social data.

As Google’s Maureen Heymans puts it, “Your friends and contacts are a key part of your life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person.”

So, for example, a search for a nearby restaurant would return not only the standard list of official Web sites and mainstream media reviews, but also informal comments made by friends on the Web.

It’s an interesting idea–using the blogs, status updates and tweets from trusted users to refine our searches and make them more personally relevant to us.

That said, there’s a fine line to be tread here between sharing information within a social network and protecting privacy. Of course, as Google (GOOG) notes, the information that it’s indexing is already published publicly on the Web and you need to be signed in to a Google account to access it. So presumably, information that isn’t public won’t show up in social search. Says Google: “What we’ve done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091027/google-social-search/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090317/myspace-pali-sees-big-rev-drop-expects-layoffs/ http://allthingsd.com/20090317/myspace-pali-sees-big-rev-drop-expects-layoffs/#comments Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:15:34 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=9532 The time has come for big changes at MySpace, according to Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield.

In a research note this morning, Greenfield asserts that, with just over a year to go on the News Corp. (NWS) unit’s search advertising deal with Google (GOOG), “it appears as though Google simply does not care about social search.” He contends it is difficult to imagine Google paying anywhere near what they were previously shelling out to MySpace, “especially as the inherent functionality of social networks is diminishing the importance of search.” The current deal expires in June 2010.

Greenfield estimates that MySpace will get about $300 million in revenue from Google in both the June 2009 fiscal year and in FY 2010, or about 35 percent of revenues in each year. He says there could be some competition for a new deal from Yahoo (YHOO), AOL (TWX) and MSN (MSFT), but he nonetheless sees a 50 percent drop in search fees. He also notes that Fox Interactive Media, the NWS unit that includes MySpace, is seeing costs increase even as revenues shrink.

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