This afternoon, Bing will take a big step forward in terms of social search.  Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of the Online Audience Business at Microsoft, announced at SMX Advanced that a Bing site will start to integrate information from Facebook.

Bing.com/social – which isn’t live at the time of this writing – is supposed to build on the connection Microsoft has been establishing with Twitter over the past year or so.  And indeed, rather than just return celebrities’ profiles or a stream of status updates, it should utilize "the full Facebook firehose with non-pages content."

In an email to WebProNews, a Microsoft representative explained, "bing.com/social uses public updates from Fan Pages and aggregated data from public updates to deliver real-time results and enables users to make better decisions by tapping into micro-content generated by people across the world."

No one needs to worry about their thoughts being paraded in front of random searchers, however, because Microsoft took some precautions even where public updates are concerned.  Just popular links, and not any names, photos, or user-sourced text, will be shown.

All in all, this arrangement sounds rather impressive.  Bing.com/social appears to stand a good chance of winning a following outside search- and tech-centric communities, too, since Facebook remains so much more popular than Twitter.