Bing Evangelist Kunal Das was in town for the Nashville AMA meeting on Dec 8. One of the most interesting things he showed was how Bing will sniff your Facebook settings if you’re logged into Facebook. Bing uses the info to show which of your friends have liked a company or website that shows in the Bing Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

I asked Kunal if the Likes from your Facebook Friends impact the rankings you see. He said that Bing is considering using that as a scoring factor but it’s not impacting the rankings today. (I later found a May 2011 Bing post that said the opposite. Have they rolled it back?) Just knowing that some of my friends have liked a company should help me get better results. The problem is that on a handful of Bing searches, it seems that Facebook Likes from my friends are HURTING the ranking of web pages.

Example Search: Nashville

Kunal had used a search on Nashville as his example so I did the same. Hmm, that’s weird. It looks like the result on the 1st page with the most likes from my social connnections is actually pushed down. Must just be a fluke. Let’s try another search.

Example Search: Knoxville

Wow. #1 & 2 are reversed when I log in & out of Facebook. The result that is liked by my friend Megan is pushed down. Just for fun, I logged in & out of FB, switched browsers, switched computer & repeated the search. The one Megan liked was always pushed down.

Example Search: Airlines

Alot of my friends like Southwest Airlines but Southwest.com is #5 when I see those likes. Logged out of Facebook, Southwest is #1. Apparently, Bing likes Southwest more when they ignore my friends.

To be fair, I’ve now done some other searches on Bing where Facebook Likes seem to have no impact on rankings. And eventually, I did find a search with the opposite situation. CapitalOne.com was not on the 1st page for “bank” while logged out. I logged into FB & it shows up with a Like from one of my friends. Now that seems more intuitive: a result liked by my friend should be promoted.

My point is simply that the 1st 3 searches I did on Bing seem to show that Bing punishes websites that my Friends Like on FB. Is Bing trying to tell me something about my friends?

In the official Bing Search Blog, I found a statement different than what Kunal said:

“Bing will surface results, which may typically have been on page three or four, higher in its results based on stuff your friends have liked.”

That makes more sense than what I’ve seen in my limited use of Bing today. My guess is the results I documented are either some unintended problems with “Friend Effect” on Bing or I simply happened to catch Bing cycling through different results. Either way, they missed an opportunity to impress me.

Try a few searches on Bing while logged in and out of FB. Does Bing trust your friends?