The Hill News

For the last several years, technology gurus have predicted that Internet searches will become “more social.” They anticipated that information people shared about themselves, their interests, and their opinions through social media outlets would increasingly appear in results delivered by Internet search engines like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft’s Bing. The reason for their prediction: users want this information to help in making their own decisions about what products to buy or services to use.

The predictions are rapidly becoming reality. A simple search on all three of these large search engines already yields results that include Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, Tumblr sites and LinkedIn profiles. All three search engines have begun to merge Internet searches with social media data, and the trend is likely to accelerate.

Just as the search engines work to fold in social results, the largest social media sites are acting more like search e! ngines. An entry in Facebook’s “search” box once returned only results on Facebook users. But today it also includes results from Microsoft’s Bing search engine along with Facebook user data. The boundaries between the search and social media sites are increasingly disappearing - yet another example of the fluidity of the Internet. In fact, Facebook, citing the highly competitive nature of its business in its recent S-1 filing, identifies both Google and Microsoft as competitors.

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