Microsoft is introducing deep integration with social networks to Bing, aiming to bring more personal relevance to its user search experience.

Bing has been steadily chipping away at the dominance of Google over the last three years, and yesterday its software giant creator Microsoft announced the new deep integration with Facebook.

Successfully weaving social results into search has become a key aspiration for search engines. Recommendations from friends and loved ones make up a large part of regular peoples’ decision making processes in the real world, and search companies have been trying to translate that p3ersonal relevance to peoples’ online experience for a while now.

In a blog announcing the update, Microsoft said that the connections and information shared on social networks offered an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how search should work.

“People are using the Web to do things in the real world, and that’s a big change from where things were a decade ago,” says Bing Senior Director Stefan Weitz. “And so the 10 blue links that search has been predicated on for the last decade no longer makes sense. Simply put, that’s not how you get things done.”

Once the new update becomes generally available, users who are logged in to Facebook might search for a particular subject, say, Tom Jones, Bing will search your social profile and friends’ information to return a list of people who might have posted about the Welsh crooner in the past, people who may have ‘liked’ links related to him, or even some who may have lived in or visited Wales.

Users can post a question and include Web links to get input from the friends Bing suggests, and friends can respond on Facebook or Bing, offering recommendations to help with the search. “The goal is to surface the people who have knowledge about a particular topic,” said Derrick Connell, Corporate Vice President, Bing.

“We want to make it easy for people to accomplish anything they set out to do by allowing them to tap into the wisdom of their friends and of the broader Web – the 95% of things people know but never write down.”

Bing’s update will split results into three columns, with social results displayed separately from traditional web links in a new column on the right hand side of the page.

Left – Improved Web Results: Consumers can perform traditional Web searches faster, with more relevant results using the new, cleaner user interface.

Middle – Snapshot: Users can quickly complete tasks by viewing useful information related to their searches and compiled by Bing as a single “snapshot” – all in one place in a separate column.

Right – Sidebar: Consumers can take action based on the recommendations of friends and experts in the sidebar – displayed in a third column, separate from main Web results page.

As well as friends, the sidebar also displays the names of experts and enthusiasts who have blogged or tweeted about topics related to one’s search. Users can click on the person’s name and read their blog or follow them on Twitter.

“Instead of cluttering your results with social updates, we’re honouring the purity of the core web results making it easier to focus on the links you need to get things done,” said the company’s blog, possibly in a swipe at Google’s Search Plus Your World, which, some might argue, clutters up your results in exactly that way.

SEO and search marketing expert Gareth Morgan, CEO of UK based Liberty Marketing believes that this might be the change that Bing needs to finally catch up to Google.

“Google has tried taking Facebook head on by developing Google Plus but it isn’t working out so far,” he said. “Microsoft has been far cleverer here and, by working with Facebook to improve their core product, I think they will be in a strong position to grow users and get a lot more web time out of existing ones.”

The new release of Bing will begin rolling out in the coming weeks and will be broadly available in the U.S. in early June. Qi Lu, president of Microsoft’s Online Services Division, says this investment is just the beginning. “We’ve now entered a new era of search,” he said. “We have begun an important journey that is no longer just about pulling in a bunch of Web pages. It’s about completing tasks quickly and efficiently with the help of Bing, the best of the Web, and people and experts we all trust.”