In our last post we talked about Bing’s new Twitter Search. There has also been a lot of talk back and forth regarding the integration of Facebook status udpates and Bing search results as well. Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg told the Telegraph:
“We should have our public updates integrated into a Bing beta within a couple of months. Unlike Twitter’s data stream, which is already totally public, we have to be very careful about making sure the correct data is streamed.”
Facebook adamantly denounced that there was any financial incentive behind their Bing agreement. Despite the lack of financial stimulus for the deal, Facebook is still extremely close with Microsoft given the company’s previous $240 million investment and separate search agreement.
As you can imagine, some folks are already worried about the privacy issues involved with their status updates being leveraged by a search engine. While Facebook has provided an “Everyone” privacy setting for profiles for some time now, we have no information about how many users have opted into that setting. However there will be a new search privacy setting according to Tech Crunch’s Mike Arrington who says that:
“Facebook is creating privacy controls, we’ve learned, that will allow users to set even previously public status updates to private, meaning search engines will be prohibited from indexing the content.”
In a week full of exciting news only time will tell who benefits from the agreements in the long run! What are you thoughts?
