Microsoft and Quora just announced a new partnership that will bring content from the popular Q&A site to Bing’s social sidebar. Unlike some of Bing’s other integrations with social networks like Facebook, the Quora integration focuses less on content from your friends and more on bringing content from Quora’s topic experts to Bing. Just like the launch of Quora’s embeddable quotes earlier this week, this move clearly shows the company’s desire to court a more mainstream audience.
With this new integration, Bing users will be able to hover over a Quora user’s name and immediately see the answers they have shared and click through to Quora for more answers. As Quora notes, if you don’t want your answers on the site to be surfaced on Bing, you need to ensure that you disallow search engine indexing in your Quora settings.
According to Microsoft, this integration is part of its “ongoing commitment to work with industry partners to make the social experience compelling and useful for customers.” Just recently, Bing expanded its network of partner services by launching support for Foursquare in its sidebar. Bing also currently features integration with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and Microsoft plans to add similar integrations in the coming months.
For Quora, this move could allow the company to break out of its current early adopter niche and become more of a mainstream service. Earlier this year, the company raised $40 million at a $400 million valuation and at that time, Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo told our own Alexia Tsotsis that he doesn’t think of “mainstream as a binary thing. I think that as it grows bigger, more and more people will use it to tell their stories.” Earlier this week, Quora also launched its embeddable quotes feature, which our own Josh Constine also saw as a way for Quora to get “the off-site eyeballs it needs to make learning more mainstream.”
Bing is a decision (search) engine from Microsoft officially announced on May 28, 2009. It combines technology from the Farecast and Powerset acquisitions, as well as new algorithms and a more colorful page design, to attempt to understand the context behind the search, which Microsoft claims gives users better results. Bing as a brand is also an attempt to eliminate the confusion caused by Microsoft’s “Windows Live” branding. Bing is now everything “search” related, whereas Windows Live encompasses the remnants...
Quora, founded in June 2009, first launched in private beta in January 2010. Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question. One way you can think of it is as a cache for the research that people do looking things up on the web and asking...
Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market. Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...
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