Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is rolling out today an expansion to features on its Bing search engine that would display personalized results based on what trusted friends recommend on Facebook, the world's most popular social network.

Starting Tuesday, Bing's search results will vary depending on whether the person making a request is logged into Facebook's online social network at the same time.

With the recent changes, searches for places will list friends who live nearby. A search for for Amazon.com shows Amazon items "liked" by friends, as well as popular items among the Facebook community.

"Today, search remains largely driven by facts and links - we think it's time to change that," said Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of Microsoft, said in a Blog post.

Microsoft has been overhauling the Bing search engine in June 2009, trying to build a credible alternative to Google, which dominates the search engine market.

Mr. Mehdi said, "Research tells us that 90% of people seek advice from family and friends as part of the decision making process. This "Friend Effect" is apparent in most of our decisions and often outweighs other facts because people feel more confident, smarter and safer with the wisdom of their trusted circle. A movie critic may pan the latest summer block buster, but your friends say it's the feel good movie of the year, so you ignore the critic and go (and wholeheartedly agree). Historically, search hasn't incorporated this "Friend Effect" - and 80% of people will delay making a decision until they can get a friend's stamp of approval. This decision delay, or period of time it takes to hunt down a friend for advice, can last anywhere from a few minutes to days, whether you're waiting for a call back, text, email or tweet."

Mr. Mehdi added Bing is bringing the collective IQ of the Web together with the opinions of the people you trust most, to bring the "Friend Effect" to search. Starting May 16, you can receive personalized search results based on the opinions of your friends by simply signing into Facebook. New features make it easier to see what your Facebook friends "like" across the Web, incorporate the collective know-how of the Web into your search results, and begin adding a more conversational aspect to your searches. Decisions can now be made with more than facts, now the opinions of your trusted friends and the collective wisdom of the Web.

"Search is better when it's not just based in math and algorithms, but also infused with the opinions of people," Mr. Mehdi said.
Microsoft and Facebook announced their partnership seven months, clearly in an effort to lure traffic away from Google, the Internet's most profitable company. Microsoft also previously inked a search agreement with Yahoo.

According to comScore, Inc., Google led the explicit core search market in the United States in April with 65.4 percent of search queries. Yahoo! and Microsoft (Bing) took the second and third spots with 15.7 percent and 13.9 percent of the U.S. market, respectively. Ask Network had 3.1 percent of the searches while AOL, Inc., was fifth with 1.6 percent. In the first quarter of this year alone, Google recorded revenues of $8.575 billion, with 97% derived from Internet ads. The search giant had net income of $1.798 billion or $5.51 per diluted share in the first quarter of 2011.

Google, on the other hand, is taking a bite at the operating systems market, which is currently dominated by Microsoft. Google Inc. announced early this month that laptop computers running on search giant's Chrome operating-system software will go on sale in June, marking a significant step in its effort to compete with Microsoft.

Google and Facebook have also been involved in controversy. Last week Facebook's acknowledged that it had secretly hired a public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, to persuade reporters and bloggers to write negative stories about Google's privacy problems. But the plan backfired.

Microsoft owns a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook.

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