One Small Step for Google, One Giant Leap for Bing

Search is critical to commerce, but the rise of content farms and all the other kinds of search engine optimization technologies has made it hard for people to differentiate between junk and valuable sites.  Despite all the algorithms that power search engines, people are still much smarter than machines at telling the difference between a content-farmed page or a scam and a real product page.

Both Bing and Google are busy integrating social recommendations - "likes" - into their search results.  As time goes on, you'll see search results annotated with information about who likes what in your social network.  But the difference between the two is enormous, and for once, Bing has something that Google can't match: integrated data from Facebook.  

When it comes to "likes" online, there's Facebook and then there's everything else.  Google has tried and repeatedly failed to break into the social networking business.  Without 500 million users "liking" stuff on a daily basis, Bing's ability to present socially relevant search results is an order (or orders) of magnitude better than Google.

And because people are so much better than algorithms at picking good sites from bad, this advantage could start to eclipse all of Google's other advantages and put Bing in the leadership position.

Upper right on Bing: log in using Facebook and get search results that are influenced by your social network.