Facebook Likes Begin Ranking in Bing?!?

Yesterday Bing announced that specific links that have been ‘liked’ by your Facebook friends will be highlighted in the search results page. This is a development from the separate set of Facebook results that occasionally appear for generic search queries.

Although this feature is still being rolled out, a preview image on the Bing blog illustrates how displaying the Facebook ‘Like’ button may change visual indicators on a page and draw a user’s attention to different parts of a search results page.

The implied concept is that the social web now influences where websites rank in search results. However, whilst this sounds like a gigantic revelation, it is not possible that this can influence anything but a minute fraction of all searches. Even Bing says that the algorithm didn’t determine the ‘liked’ result to be most relevant to the query. In fact the display of ‘liked’ results operates more like an FYI, or footnote, to users. Read more at blog.searchenginewatch.com