Will integrating Twitter and Facebook into Bing help Microsoft gain an advantage in the search-engine wars? Microsoft certainly thinks so: Take a look at Bing Social, a new Website that incorporates tweets and shared links from Facebook pages into a single interface.

Bing already indexes tweets, as evidenced by its Bing Twitter page. Bing Social takes it one step further: By typing in a term like "eWeek," you receive not only the latest tweets, but also shared links from Facebook users--as long as the users in question have their sharing status set on "everyone."

Microsoft seems cognizant of how, in recent months, social-networking applications have the potential to become a privacy-concern minefield. With regard to the Facebook links, "no names or photos, or even the text in the update associated with the link are published--just the link in aggregate," Lawrence Kim, a member of the Bing team, wrote in a June 9 posting on the Bing Community blog. "For example, searching for 'World Cup' will show what links Facebook users are sharing on the topic--with a caption that is extracted from the original article shown below the link."

I personally think the jury's still out about the utility of incorporating social-networking feeds into traditional search--while it's definitely useful for monitoring trends, there's also the high potential for users to find themselves inundated by a constant stream of real-time information, to the point where they gravitate away. Nonetheless, both Google and Yahoo seem determined to pursue this avenue. Both companies having also struck deals with Twitter.

By the way--and I'm sure everyone's noticed this by now--Google seems to be imitating Bing with the background images on its homepage. Personally, I've always preferred Google's soothing blankness to both Yahoo's overstuffed Webpage and Bing's occasional cutesy wallpaper, so I hope they introduce the ability to switch it back, without needing to migrate over to the Google SSL search page, which continues to Don't Be Evil to my eyes.

Microsoft executives seem pretty thrilled about Google's new look, at least according to a June 10 article on Telegraph.co.uk. "Imitation, however pale, is the sincerest form of flattery," Ashley Highfield, managing director of Microsoft's U.K. consumer division, posted on his Twitter feed. "A certain search engine has put up the same picture of tulip fields used on Bing long ago."

A more tongue-in-cheek response, though, would be for Bing to switch to an everything-white homepage.