Microsoft expanded its partnership with Facebook on Monday, melding Bing search results with data from the Facebook network of the person doing the searching. The new "social search" features — you'll see what stories and products your Facebook friends "like" in your search results, for example — are an assault on the dominant search engine, Google, which just launched its own social search feature, called +1. Can Facebook and Microsoft do together what neither has been able to do on its own, and humble Google on its own turf?
Google can't win this round: Google "recognizes that social search is increasingly important," says Juan Carlos Perez at Computerworld. But its nascent +1 feature won't pose a real threat to Facebook's mighty "like" button. And thanks to their bitter rivalry, Google will probably never have access to Facebook's valuable trove of social data. Now Bing does, and "the deeper the access to its data, the better for search engine providers."
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