Bing’s Spring Release is here!

The Bing team continues to add new innovations and we continue to take market share from Google. Today, we are bringing together the power of search and your friends to deliver personalized search results to you based in part on the opinions of your Facebook friends. These new features make it easy to see what your Facebook friends ‘like’ across the web. Bing now also incorporates the collective IQ of the web into your search results.

Here’s more details in the announcement from our Bing group:

We’ve made big investments in some key areas to bring the power of your trusted friends into Bing:

· Trusted Friends – Research shows that 90% of people seek advice from family and friends before making decisions. Many decisions are emotional and can’t be made with facts alone; they require input from friends. Because you’ve always trusted your friends, now what they “like” on Facebook can help you decide on Bing. And you won’t find Facebook on Google.

· Collective IQ – There’s tremendous value in the larger brain trust of the Web. Bing now brings the collective IQ of people to decision making online, so when your friends don’t have the right expertise, or you may not even know exactly what you’re looking for, the collective IQ of the Web can help. If your friends can’t help you decide, often the rest of the Web can.

· A More Conversational Search – Many decisions require a discussion with your friends. By combining Facebook’s communication tools with Bing, search can become conversational – taking decision-making on Bing from a passive experience to an active dialogue. For example, Bing now has features to help you pick the brains of friends who live where you’re traveling. Or share shopping lists with your own team of retail gurus. This is just the beginning, with tremendous potential ahead.

Go try it out yourself (try Microsoft or MSN). It’s still the same great decision engine from Bing.  Now, it lets you tap into the opinions and recommendations of your Facebook network and the Web so you can make faster, more informed decisions (US only, for now). 

If you’d like to see more of your friend’s input, encourage them to “like” stuff on the Web, and to help out your friends – make sure you “like” things too. Our new Bing Toolbar has a universal “like” button that lets you like any site on the web – download it today to help your search experience become more social.

Check out the Bing blog for a detailed run-through of all the great innovation the team has delivered, and as always send us your feedback.

We hope you like what you see, and you tell your friends.  After all, that’s kind of what it’s all about.