The local Microsoft office has been hosting live events via their live meeting software, broadcast to nearly every college in a 3 state area, including this one. Today, the presentations were about Bing, (the search engine that is Microsoft's answer to Google) about what they do, what kind of people they want to hire, etc. Just casually in passing, a couple of presenters talked about the "partnership" with Facebook, and how they were able to exploit that in deciphering the intent of a person's query. Deciphering intent can be challenging. For instance, if a person searches for "jaguar", do they mean the animal, the car, or the sports team?
I was astonished when they described how they used Facebook, so during the question and answer session, I asked them to describe the interface more fully. Yes, I had heard them correctly. Essentially, if you log into Bing, and if you also have a Facebook account, they will search your interests on Facebook, and go out to your Facebook friends, and search their interests, also, to better determine your search intent.
Does anyone besides me find this a little spooky?
Yeah, it's spooky. I've gotten to where I only browse in a virtual machine and using "web" identities. On the plus side, "Southern Man" now gets lots of mail and friend requests...
ReplyDeleteWow, it took me like eight tries before that comment took. Are you still having trouble commenting at Southern Man?
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