Bing and Google are both trying to turn search into a social experience.
Google is doing it by integrating the Google Side-wiki into search, by incorporating Google buzz results into your search results, with Google me, and other recent stabs at the combination of search and social. They’re trying new ones all the time.
Bing is doing it by connecting up to Facebook, seeing who your friends are, what they like, and including those likes into your search results.
The point is they’re both competing to bring you a more social search, seemingly operating with “the web is social now, let’s make search social” as their mantra.
This, to me, translates to, “Let’s change what makes search valuable into something entirely different”.
I can see why they feel the money lies in combining the two. But they should not mix the two beyond the absolute minimum and they should maintain the possibility of keeping them completely separate.
Wombat Zone
I love doing the whole webmaster thing. Does anyone else remember when your company spellchecker used to correct the word “webmaster” to “wombats” if you weren’t careful? Or have I been doing this whole internet thing too long? I remember when the amazing buzz words were things like “file sharing” and “get answers in minutes, …