A Tale of a Social Search Engine

By Stacie Susens – Director, Client Strategy and Development

I have been seeing a lot of blogs about the recent Facebook and Bing partnership claiming that it will now make search social. Adam Ostrow from mashable.com has a good blog summarizing the partnership and what you as a searcher can expect to see. I have been keeping an eye out for this but I personally have not seen anything on my Bing search results page. Maybe I don’t have enough friends who like enough stuff…

I have also been thinking a lot about Facebook’s open graph and how this brings search to social. As a searcher AND someone who checks into Facebook daily, I realized I haven’t used Facebook to search and thought it was about time I gave it a try.

To be timely with the recent holiday, below are search results for ‘halloween costumes’ on google.com, bing.com and facebook.com. Let’s compare the results and ultimately determine if the social search engine is giving typical search engines a run for their money.

Google Search Results for ‘halloween costumes’

Google Summary: 
Google is mainly, or I should say only, presenting us with listings of sites that are selling Halloween costumes. Here is a breakdown of the results:

• 9 paid search ads selling Halloween costumes or decorations 
• 1 row of image shopping results of sites selling costumes
• 2 natural search listings for sites selling Halloween costumes

And what you can’t see below the fold: more Halloween shopping sites and news results for Halloween costumes.

Bing Search Results for ‘halloween costumes’

Bing Summary: 
As we saw with Google, Bing is mainly presenting us with listings that are selling Halloween costumes. Here is a breakdown of the results (eerily familiar):

• 9 paid search ads selling Halloween costumes
• 1 natural image listings for top 2010 Halloween costumes that are also for sale
• 2 natural search listings for sites selling Halloween costumes

And what you can’t see below the fold: more Halloween shopping sites and a map for local listings of places selling Halloween costumes.

Facebook Search Results for ‘halloween costumes’

Below the fold: Posts by Friends

Below the fold: Web Results

Now I’m starting to see some variety in the results. Unlike Google and Bing I decided to include the below the fold screen shots because the results were completely different from the top of the page. Here is the break out of all search results:

• 3 Facebook pages of companies selling Halloween costumes but have a lot fans, pictures, and wall content to browse through
• 3 right rail text/image ads not related to Halloween
• 3 recent posts from friends about ‘halloween costumes’ or just ‘costumes’
• 3 web results from Bing – which are 3 companies selling Halloween costumes

Conclusion
At the end of the day, each of us is different and may be looking for different information. Since it’s after Halloween and I am more in the mind set to see what the fun costumes were, I preferred the Facebook results. Beyond discovering which search engine results I preferred for the query ‘halloween costumes’ other points about each of the tools caught my attention:

1. If you are ready to buy, then Google or Bing are better choices
2. Facebook needs to work on the relevancy of their ads
3. Google and Bing have prioritized paid listings over natural listings compared Facebook

Give social search a try and let me know what you think!