Bing, Microsoft's search engine rival to Google and Yahoo, has just added integration with Facebook in what it is calling 'social search'.  If you are logged into Facebook or enable Bing to access your Facebook information, it will use your friends' 'Likes' to highlight their favored bands, restaurants, news sources and more. 

Say you are looking for an 'Italian restaurant' in Woodbridge, it would feature restaurants that your friends may have previously Liked on, or that have fan pages that your friends subscribe to.  It does the same for anything else that can be liked--from bands to clothing brands.

This hopefully gives you the results that you would be most interested in or that most closely fits your personality and tastes.  Instead of polling your friends, you already have ready access to their opinions.  As we all know, the sheer number of results for any given search can be overwhelming.  Be able to enlist others who you trust to help you filter without having to reach out for results each time is a timesaver and hopefully will lead you to the best answers for you.

Of course, you may not want to see this information or have your information shared.  This can be controlled in Facebook's privacy settings and if you use a Bing toolbar, you can turn off social search.

It may take a while before your searches show social search information as your friends may not have given the thumbs up to any of the topics you are researching.  It will be interesting to see how this evolves as more people participate.  One of the first social search results I noticed was an article I had had liked on Patch.  Each article's page has the option to like it on Facebook.  If you never saw a reason to press the like button on articles before, now at least is a reason to share your opinions.

More information is available at Bing's social search page.