Bing adds new Facebook photo search feature

Bing added a feature Thursday that lets people search through photos friends posted on Facebook. ‘With more than 300 million photos uploaded to Facebook per day, photo viewing is one of the most popular things people do on Facebook,’ Bing social team senior program manager Ian Lin said in a blog post. ‘Now, with Bing, you can easily search and browse your friends’ photo collections.’ The Facebook photo search feature was available at bing.com/friendsphotos. In May, Microsoft began weaving data from users’ Facebook friends into Bing results as part of the biggest revamp of the search engine since its launch three years ago. The new version of Bing introduced a ‘social sidebar’ that lists Facebook friends who may know something about a query topic. In a move appearing shrewdly visionary, Microsoft in late 2007 paid what seemed an exorbitant $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. The investment put Microsoft in a position to build a relationship with the California-based startup that boasts a stated mission of making the Internet more social.