Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Microsoft's Stefan Weitz Explains Bing's Facebook Obsession (Video)

Bing this week started weaving Facebook likes, shares and profile information more deeply into its search results.

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.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald