The Evolution of Social & Search Across Google and Bing
In the last few months, there has been a lot of buzz surrounding Google’s and Bing’s latest updates to their social search features. Instead of setting real time results from social networks like Twitter and Facebook apart from organic results, both search engines are streamlining search engine results pages (SERPs) by combining organic results with this social context. Google, at least, has said that for some searches, social context will boost the rankings of results higher on the SERP than regular results. These announcements are just further confirmation of the convergence of social and search, and signal the growing importance of social media marketing for businesses.
In continuing with our series on The Changing Face of SERPs, we’ve decided to take a close look at the social evolution of SERPs. We’ll address both how Google’s changing the way they integrate Twitter results into search results and how Bing’s evolving their inclusion of Facebook Like data in SERPs. In adjusting their search algorithm for the increasingly social behavior of Internet users, the search engines have tested a variety of social search result variations. Google’s Social Search update and Bing’s newest additions to their “Liked Results” are just the latest roll outs in this evolution.
What’s noteworthy about this latest change to SERPs?
- Both Google and Bing have moved away from showing tweets and sectioned-off “Liked Results” in the SERPs. Now, the search engines are putting the website front and center, with this social context as a subscript. These social recommendations are still included in the search result, but now they’re a click away, instead of being directly displayed in the SERP.
- Search engines are now doing this extra mapping for users by sending them to the correct website, as well as providing the origin of the recommendation (i.e. friend’s profile, original recommendation).
- With these social annotations, the search engines are giving users some visibility as to why they’re showing certain results.
Google’s evolving the way they integrate Twitter results into SERPs
Google’s SERPs have progressed from an organic result, to a specific tweet from a user within your social circle who mentions a link, and now to a combination of the two: the website result, a link to the friend’s social network profile (e.g. Twitter account) who did the sharing and a link to the original recommendation. Below we’ve illustrated how Google’s results have evolved over time.
- Classic result : Google’s organic result for a keyword search
- Tweet result: An actual tweet from friends within your social network, mentioning your search query
- Combined result: The website result, with additional annotations linking to your friend’s profile and a time stamp that redirects to the original recommendation
Bing’s changing how they incorporate Facebook Like data into SERPs
Bing has primarily focused on the integration of Facebook Like data in their SERPs. Their social search features have evolved from organic results to a module within SERPs that’s set apart from organic search results with the header, “Liked by your Facebook friends,” to listing organic results with an added social annotation mentioning friends from your Facebook network who have also ‘Liked’ the URL. You can see this progression below:
- Classic result
- “Liked Results”: A separate module included alongside organic results in the SERP (includes the website result, friend’s profile)
- Combined result: The website result front and center, with social context (friend’s names and profile pictures who have liked the link)
Facebook’s Using Bing Results in Facebook Search
Another development of note is how Facebook has started providing Bing’s Web results as a part of their Search feature. Twitter isn’t using Google results, just yet, but judging from Facebook’s and Bing’s partnership, it might be a matter of time before we see this unfold.
How significant is this change for marketers?
This is yet again confirmation that social media optimization should be an integral part of any company’s search strategy. Steps like getting retweets and mentions on Twitter, ‘Likes’ on Facebook, mentions on Quora and having an RSS feed for your blog are all becoming crucial for today’s online businesses to gain visibility through search engines and social networks. Additionally, this places word-of-mouth marketing on a much larger scale. As search gets more social, the idea of the social footprint which gives you exponential reach into a follower or fan’s social network just from a simple @mention, RT, Like or follow will have a whole new large-scale reach. When people share your content, it will show up for their friends across their social networks and in their friends’ SERPs.
