Microsoft’s Bing search engine likes Facebook

Facebook’s initial public offering will hand the social network billions of dollars to spend on future projects, and turn many of its employees into millionaires or billionaires.
It will also intensify competition with Google, which desperately wants to establish an outsized presence in the social-networking realm. Google+, the search-engine giant’s attempt to out-Facebook Facebook, reached 90 million user accounts by mid-January 2012—a fraction of Facebook’s 845 million users, true, but also a number likely to increase as Google continues to pour in time and resources.
Analysts and pundits have pointed to Google’s variety of services—and an increasing willingness to share individual user data across them—as a potential point in the company’s favor as it battles Facebook. But that advantage isn’t an asymmetrical one: Facebook can rely on its deepening relationship with Microsoft to provide some added heft outside its walled, everything-blue garden.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine likes Facebook. It likes Facebook so much, in fact, that the search engine bakes the social network’s “Like” button into its results. That’s the result of Microsoft’s decision to evolve the platform by, in the words of Bing director Stefan Seitz, “infusing the emotional into it.”
Nor does the collaboration end there. When Bing users search for a specific person, the search engine can present Facebook information on the results page. If they’re traveling to a new city, such as Paris, Bing can display which Facebook friends live there. Bing will also present companies’ and brands’ Facebook posting

Image via CrunchBase

s, alerting users to deals.