One of the strongest references and trust points for any product or service is for a friend to recommend a product or service. It happens every day, a friend asks you “Do you like the Kindle?” or “I noticed you have an iPhone, what do you think of it?”. It can happen at a party, at work or even online via email or Facebook.

I recall a community event we were planning and at the first meeting one person had an iPhone by the time we finished the organisation of  the event a couple of months later everyone had bought one…the power  of “word of mouth”!!

The Power Of “World Of Mouth”

We now have word of mouth on steroids and it is called “World of Mouth” where people share their likes online (Facebook) to their friends and they pass it on and soon 1,000 people Globally have heard about your event, product or service.

Bing recently announced that they have “introduced Liked Results, which promotes links your friends have publicly liked or shared via Facebook…If your friends have publicly liked or shared any of the algorithmic search results shown on Bing, we will now surface them right below the result.”

If several of my friends that have been to Napa in the past have “Liked” Churchill Manor, it gets highlighted with their pictures and names – making it easier for me to quickly refine my search and decide where I should stay.

Now that starts to really up the game on the power play of social search with all its trust leverage and social proof to possibly be a game changer.

Bing’s Social Search

Click here to view the embedded video.

What Google Is Missing

Google doesn’t have the relationship with Facebook that Bing has and is missing the access to the “Like” data that is the Facebook walled garden and cannot reproduce those results. Recent research from comScore has shown that Bing is leading core search engine growth with it’s increase in search volume reaching 29% in 2010.

The growth of Facebook is also starting to make the Google look over its shoulder and wonder how it can stop the social networking gorilla invading its turf. Last year total time spent on Facebook surpassed Google for the first time.

Is Google’s domination under threat with Bing working in closer partnership with Facebook?  The social web is changing the internet’s landscape and nothing is forever so what you see today will be quite different in 10 years.

What are your thoughts?

This is a guest post by Evan Britton about a very active and growing technology “Real Time Search” which of course has been driven by the growth of Twitter and Social Media..

There is a new way to search the web, and boatloads of users who have experienced the real time web have been impressed with the results. Traditional search engines rank sites based on relevancy. Because of this, the results don’t change a lot; a search today will reveal most of the same sites and information that were there last month. However, with companies like Twitter and Facebook having millions of users continue to post content and status updates – there is now real time content on the web which updates each second. Search engines and startups have leveraged this information to offer internet users instant access to what is happening right now.

So, when breaking news happens, a real time search will instantly give you the public’s thoughts, opinions, and experiences in relation to the breaking news. A search on Google news would give you links to articles written by people in the media, a real time search will allow you to sift through all internet users comments and thoughts. There have been several startups which have launched search engines and tools to try and offer users a good experience in searching and navigating through the real time web:

Here is a list of three startups along with a quick overview of what makes each of them stand out:

1: Topsy

 What makes Topsy’s real time search engine stand out is that it is focused on real time links as opposed to real time content. So, when you perform a search at Topsy, instead of seeing what people are talking about on the real time web, you are going to see what the most popular and prominent links are being shared on the real time web. You can ever sort to see the most shared links over the past hour, day, week, or month.

2: OneRiot

Rumors have been swirling all over the web in regards to a partnership Yahoo is discussing with OneRiot. OneRiot offers users a real time search engine which can be sorted based on web results and video results. OneRiot also announced in early October that it will be rolling out a platform for advertisers to pay for listings to featured content on their results pages. While most real time web companies have been focused on technology and traffic, OneRiot seems to be an early leader in the monetization of the real time web.

3: Sency*

Sency has built a free feed for websites and blogs . The feed brings in real time content which updates automatically on the site or blog it is published on. The site and blog owners are able to select which keyword they want the feed to scroll for. So, a blog about sports, can for example, have automatically updating real time content anytime someone uses the word baseball or football shows up on the real time web

So are you using real time search, such as Topsy, OneRiot or Sency, or Twitters real time search of tweets?  

*This article was written by Evan Britton, founder of Sency