Maybe I just need better friends, but I can't shake the feeling that "social search" isn't all it's cracked up to be.
For the uninitiated, that's the trend among search engines toward including results from Facebook contacts, Twitter followees and other digital buddies among the traditional blue links. Given my skepticism, you'd think I wouldn't like the new social-centric version of Microsoft's Bing, the perpetual No. 2 to Google.
That's not the case. In making social-search results more prominent, Bing has at the same time reorganized its screen layout to make them easier to ignore when they aren't relevant. The result is a cleaner, calmer interface that lets users focus more specifically on finding the information they need.
Some searches naturally invite others' opinions. What are the best Chinese restaurants on the San Francisco Peninsula? Is "The Avengers" worth seeing in 3D? For many other queries, though, the social component is useless. If I want to know the current enrollment at Yale, it doesn't matter that four of my Facebook friends studied there and "Like" it.
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Until now, Bing displayed such information amid its main results in the form of a row of too-tiny Facebook profile pictures. The social-search components, along with extraneous material jammed in, resulted in more scrolling.
In the new layout, the screen is broken into three components. The left-hand column, the widest, is a clean list of relevant blue links.
If you've signed in to Bing with your Facebook ID, a gray thumbs-up icon appears next to any link endorsed by a friend. Hovering over the icon identifies who it is. Otherwise, the results are mercifully clear of clutter.
A column Microsoft calls Snapshot includes the expected text-based ads and related searches, but also relevant information that changes as your mouse hovers.
The biggest change is the new third column, a gray bar called Sidebar. It's all about social. When you enter a query, Sidebar immediately suggests contacts under the heading "Friends Who Might Know." For some searches, the Sidebar also suggests people outside your own networks - bloggers, Tweeters and others - who might be authoritative sources.