Bing does social search

Bing has launched a dedicated social search page indexing the most popular trending topics (or the ‘hottest’ ones, as Bing bills them) and then giving you a selection of what your fellow web surfers around the world are saying about them.

When I checked in to bing.com/social to see what it was all about, the ‘hottest’ topic was A Team. I’m guessing this is because of buzz surrounding the forthcoming film The A-Team, but unfortunately Bing social search wasn’t discerning between the film and any old post mentioning the word team.

Microsoft says that Bing Social will search Twitter for relevant updates, making it the thousandth way of search through Twitter.

But it will also search through Facebook fan pages and post content from there. If something is trending that doesn’t have a Facebook fan page (seems impossible, but just in case), Bing will update with popular shared links from Facebook as well as updates from users who have theirs set to share with everyone.

What it doesn’t seem to be doing is scrolling through the latest updates – a feature that Google includes in its social media search. But Bing fans have welcomed the development.