It’s well known within the Internet industry that Bing has special access to Facebook and Twitter that Google doesn’t. They pay for such access. Google thinks it can do better by putting Google+ content all over its results with Search Plus Your World. Not everyone is a fan of this.
Liz Gannes at All Things D ran an interview with Bing Director Stefan Weitz today, and pressed him about why Bing isn’t taking more advantage of the uproar around Google’s SPYW, given that it has the Twitter and Facebook access that Google doesn’t. They talk about more than that, but here are the relevant things that Weitz said to that part of the converstaion:
We are doing some ads this week [There was also a Bing-is-great blog post today]. They [Google] are doing a nice job on their own of handling this problem.
But they are learning just like we are. They did what we didn’t want to do, which was make the user experience peppered with this stuff, with +1s everywhere, the Google+ content in the top corner. I think [Google] realized we were ahead and they overextended. But I know a ton of guys there and they’re smart and they’re reacting what has been said.
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You’re going to see the culmination of a lot of our learnings in the not too distant future. All those lessons will be applied into something that I think is pretty interesting. How we think about social is always evolving, and the next turn of the crank is more differentiated than we’ve seen in the past.
At least now we know what that Bing’s Favorite Bing features post was about. I have to admit, I’m curious about this “something interesting”.