Given that Google has been widely criticized for putting too much emphasis on links to its own social network, it is worth noting that Bing uses your Facebook profile as its main result and then highlights the other pages you curate underneath that. Your Google+ profile, of course, can be one of these links, too.

Link to Me

Thanks to its close relationship with Facebook, it’s no surprise that Bing uses the social network as the basis for this tool. You use it to log in to Bing to customize your links, for example, and you can also post newly linked sites to your Facebook profile as well. To prevent you from spamming your friends with new links, only the first link of the day will be posted in your Facebook timeline.

The Bing team has decided to go one step further, though, and also allows others to make suggestions for sites you could be connected to. This linking isn’t automatic, though, and Bing will always ask you for permission first.

You can, of course, always remove a link as well.

Getting Started

Here is how all of this works in practice:

You first log in to Bing’s Linked Pages tool (using your Facebook credentials). Then, Bing will display all the pages it found about you and then lets you choose which of those links are really about you (and not about somebody you share a name with).

Similarly, you can search for your friends (assuming you are also their friend on Facebook) and then suggest sites that are linked to them.

Video

You can see the feature in action below (narrated by an oddly infomercial-sounding Stefan Weitz):

Mobile, But Still Limited

This means, you can now use the regular search feature in the browser on your phone to look for something like [flights from New York to Washington] and bring up the mobile flight search feature.

This new feature brings most of the desktop version's tools to the mobile version as well, including the ability to discover places on a map and the ability to find the cheapest dates to travel.

Even on mobile, Google's travel search tools is still the fastest in the business, but at the same time, though, it also suffers from the same limitations as the desktop version. You can't use a search query to specify specific dates, for example. If you do so, flight search won't even kick in. Flight search also still doesn't work for international destinations.

How Google Identifies Authors

In order to get this to work, writers will have to ensure that they have a Google Profile that is linked to their sites and that they use Google’s new authorship markup (specifically, the rel=”author” tag) to ensure that Google knows who wrote any given story on your site. A number of large sites, including the New York Times, have already implemented the necessary tags to highlight their authors. Adding the necessary tags to most blogs should be relatively easy for most writers, too, but for the time being, this new feature is just available in a limited pilot, though Google expects to expand this program over time.

Google, of course, has been struggling to prevent the mediocre content that most of today’s content farms push out from polluting its search results. With the recent updates to its search algorithms, it has made some strides in this direction. While it’s not directly linked to weeding out content farms, this new feature is meant to highlight content from people Google trusts. Indeed, Google argues that its users will trust content more when they know the writer and – at the same time – writers will hopefully do a better job at writing when they know their name is prominently linked to their stories.

Bing already featured some Facebook likes on its pages before, but these results were still limited to a selection of sites that were whitelisted by Bing and results appeared in their own box at the top of the search results. Today’s update brings “liked results” to any page on the Web that one of your friends has liked in the past.

Unlike Google, Bing doesn’t surface any shared links from Twitter. Google, on the other hand, doesn’t show any Facebook ‘likes’ yet.

It doesn’t look as if Bing is using these signals to influence what links you see in its algorithmically determined search results, though. Depending on how much you trust your friends’ recommendations, that is either a good or a bad thing, but chances are that Microsoft is also working on making social recommendations one of the (infamous) 1,000 signals Bing looks at to determine search relevancy.

Related articles

• Bing Catches Up to Google With Localized and Personalized Search Results
• Search Gets Personal

Localized search results are, of course, nothing new and Google has been offering this feature for quite a while now and continues to make local search a major focus of its engineering efforts. Bing, too, has been offering a local search feature for a while, but this was a separate feature in a separate tab and not integrated into the default search results page.

Now, your location will also influence the results you see on the default search results page. Providing more local search results is a major step forward for Bing, given that local search is becoming increasingly important and provides a way for the search engine to offer more relevant search results to its users. Today, according to the Bing team, “76% of people users use search engines to plan trips, events or social gatherings.”

The new personalization feature, too, will help Bing provide more relevant results. The search engine’s algorithms will now look at your search history and remember which sites you usually click on. As the Bing team notes, users “commonly re-issue such navigational queries and the intent of that user rarely changes.” So whenever Bing thinks a user is trying to “re-find” a site, it will give more weight to the link you clicked on before. If you often search for “spiegel,” for example, and usually click on the link to the German news magazine and not the fashion store, Bing will realize this and push the German link further up to the top.

But these “shared by” links are clearly new – and more and more people are now seeing them, too, so this seems to be more than just one Google’s many bucket tests and could be here to stay. These links tend to appear underneath links to news items in the OneBox news results section when you search for recent events. Another new feature is a live count of recent updates that now appears underneath the “Recent Updates” box when you search for keywords that are currently popular or trending on Twitter and Facebook.

All of this points to a new emphasis of real-time search results in Google. Over on Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan speculates that Google could soon restrict these searches to just your friends, which is entirely possible and would make sense in light of Bing’s recent addition of more social features, but I actually find the new focus on real time more interesting. All of these new links, after all, point to Google’s real-time search feature, which was mostly hidden from sight until now. Instead of just pointing to a somewhat cryptically names “Updates” section in the sidebar, this new test actually explains that these updates come from “Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and more.”