Bing deepens 'liked results' Facebook integration

Microsoft says the feature that highlights Facebook activity around some of Bing's search results has been "extended" to include any and all URLs.

The company announced the expansion in a blog post earlier today, saying that this integration was just "part of a longer journey," and that it played a complimentary role to the company's efforts in adding a social layer to is results, as it did with Twitter.

"This is the first time in human history that people are leaving social traces that machines can read and learn from, and present enhanced online experiences based on those traces," Lawrence Kim, the principal program manager for social search, said in a post on the Bing Team blog. "As people spend more time online and integrate their offline and online worlds, they will want their friends' social activity and their social data to help them in making better decisions."

Microsoft had originally unveiled the social features back in October of last year at a press conference with Bing execs and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The company rolled them out to U.S. users three weeks later.

Last week, Google unveiled a similarly social feature it's applying to search results which takes advantage of data from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks to display links that have been shared by other users.

The feature remains exclusive to U.S. users of Bing, the company said.