Starting today, Klout will begin to factor in another element when calculating your total score. Now, your Klout score includes Bing search prevalence. That means that your Klout score will improve based on how many times you’re searched for on Bing.

Of course, what this does is move Klout score a little more out of the realm of social media influence and more toward all-around real-world influence.

Klout uses Warren Buffett as an example of someone with juge real-world influence but not much in the way of social media influence (he’s only sent out a few tweets):

As an example, consider someone like Warren Buffett. Obviously Warren has tremendous real world Klout, but he isn’t particularly active on social media, with only three Tweets to his name. His relative influence can be challenging to measure with just the available online data. Our first step in solving the Buffett problem was to incorporate Wikipedia data into the Klout Score. Today, with the inclusion of Bing search results, our ability to measure influence beyond social indicators has taken a big leap forward.

Microsoft and Klout have had a partnership since last fall – Bing made a significant investment and added Klout to their social sidebar. Last week, Klout integrated with Microsoft property Yammer.

Obviously this is one of the reasons that Klout score factors in searches from Bing but not Google.

“We think this is exciting because we believe search is one of the most direct indicators of real world influence and serves as a bridge between offline and online influence,” says Klout.