SAN FRANCISCO – Microsoft’s Bing search engine is leaning more heavily on Facebook to make its results more meaningful than Google’s.
Starting Monday, Bing’s search results will vary depending on whether the person making a request is logged into Facebook’s online social network at the same time.
This means that a link that Bing’s standard ranking formula would have buried on fourth or fifth page of results might appear on the first page if the information had been recommended by friends within the searcher’s Facebook circle.
Bing is also adding several other features and tools that draw upon the preferences shared among Facebook’s more than 500 million members.
The changes are the latest step in a search alliance Microsoft Corp. and Facebook announced seven months ago in a challenge to Google Inc.
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