This morning’s keynote at SMX Advanced was given by Stefan Weitz, Director of Search at Bing.  Stefan kicked off his presentation by pointing out that Honey Badger was the codename for today’s release of Bing webmaster tools.  He proceeded to draw a parallel between how the famous crazy, nastyass honey badger is fierce and blows away all obstacles to achieve objective, much like the webmasters these new tools were designed for (and, it could be argued, the Bing team who developed them).  Unlike the viral video superstar, however, the biggest difference is that while the honey badger doesn’t care, we do; this release is all about more control and better help:

  • Crawl setting management via a drag & drop interface.
  • Role Management allows you to adjust read/write settings with more granular control of access.
  • Toolbox site update offers simple how-tos, videos, and a plethora of new data… great for training agency newbies.

You can read more about these updates and other Bing news over on the Bing Community.

Social Search

PowerofPeopleContinuing on to talk about how Bing is using Facebook data to make search more social, Stefan made the case that people are emotional when they make decisions.  They may go through all the motions of research and online shopping alone, but most often they’ll check with their spouse or a friend for their opinion before making a purchase.  Knowing this presents an opportunity to infuse social interactions into the online decision process.

As Alex Cohen of Click Equations pointed out yesterday, people don’t do well with data overload.  When there are too many options to choose from, the result is often no decision at all.  It’s part of human nature to feel as though the more information there is on any given subject, the more important decisions about those things are.  Through search, we have access to tons of data and information.  Through social network systems, we have data on relationships.  While this information is accessible, they’ve been disconnectd.  You’d do your due dilligence to find out information via search, and then would take to your social networks to ask friends, family and colleagues their opinion.  With Bing, we can improve search by enabling conversation from within it; when you get to the point of making a decision, you can bring in friends to help you right there within the Bing search results.

If you're the video viewing type, you can learn more about Bing Social Search from Stefan on YouTube.

Just before launching into the audience Q&A session, Danny Sullivan announced that he had a couple of surprises for Stefan, first presenting him with a Bing snowboard, followed by a photo/quote from Eric Schmidt

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(If you can't make it out in the picture, the quote says "Bing has done a better job")

The discussion that followed via questions submitted by the audience, both in person and online, was lively and engaging.  One of the questions raised around social search had to do with privacy concerns.  While Bing does receive information directly from Facebook, it also honors all of Facebook’s privacy settings. 

If you want to opt-out of receiving social information in your Bing searches, you can do so via the controls in the upper right hand corner of the Bing UI.  If you don’t want any of your likes or shares exposed to your friends who are receiving social results in Bing, you can do so via your Facebook privacy settings.