As previously reported, Bing has launched a new feature that surfaces authors of news articles articles in its social sidebar. Bing did not talk about how to be included in this in its announcement.
With Google, you have a specific process to follow to be included in its authorship program, which gets your picture in the search results and helps Google associate you with content you contribute to various sites. There was nothing like this mentioned in Bing’s blog post, so we reached out to find out a little more about how this works.
A spokesperson for Bing tells WebPronews, “People Who Know are experts and enthusiasts from leading sites and social networks like Twitter, foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn, Google+ and Blogger. Bing identifies ‘People Who Know’ based on what they’ve written or tweeted about. Author pages surface information from our experts/enthusiasts Twitter profiles, and recent and relevant articles they have written.”
“Some experts and enthusiasts may be influential in a number of areas including Twitter, Quora and foursquare,” the spokesperson adds. “When an expert qualifies in more than one category, in most cases we will surface their results from Twitter and Quora in sidebar. As when we introduce any new feature, we’ll continue to look closely at the right way to surface experts related to the query, and may make adjustments as we learn more about the feature.”
“We’re just beginning to surface news experts and their author pages in sidebar, so while we won’t have author pages for everyone, we’re hard at work to grow our coverage,” the spokesperson says.
It’s interesting that Bing is including Google properties like Blogger, and even Google+ (which is connected to Google’s own authorship feature) in its “people who know” mix. It’s also interesting that Facebook wasn’t mentioned in that group, considering the Bing sidebar already makes a great deal of use of Facebook.
Either way, it will be intriguing to see how the feature (and the sidebar itself, for that matter) evolves.