You're going to see some familiar faces in your Bing search results for flights, hotels and destinations.
Seeking to leverage that seeming truism that recommendations from friends are the most popular sort of advice, Bing today introduced what it calls the "friend effect" into search results.
If you search Bing for "Chicago flights", for instance, you'll see images of your Facebook friends who have "liked" particular Chicago-relevant websites, whether it be an online travel agency or newspaper website. It looks like this:
How useful it is that one of your Facebook friends likes Cheapflights.com and that another has endorsed the Chicago Tribune is open to debate, although you can always contact that Facebook friend for a deeper interrogation.
Perhaps these types of recommendations become more important when they refer to a particular hotel or tour operator.
Similarly, if you do a Bing search for "Boston," you'll see Facebook friends who "live in the area" or have liked certain websites. Take a look:
On Bing, you can sign in with Facebook to get these more personalized and hopefully more conversational search results.
"Decisions can now be made with more than facts, now [using] the opinions of your trusted friends and the collective wisdom of the Web," writes Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president, Microsoft, on the Bing community search blog.
The new features aren't travel-specific, and come into play whether you are searching for an LCD TV, snorkel gear or romantic getaway.
Bing also further integrates Facebook by accessing the latest wall posts from some companies' Facebook pages into search results. For example, after conducting an "Avis" search on Bing, it retrieves the latest wall post from Avis on its Facebook page.
Bing was believed to be in the process of rolling out these features throughout the day.
The following is a Bing video outlining the new features:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPYVqHZKF2g