Following Google's lead, Bing incorporates social media into search results

Shortly after rival Google began integrating social media into its online search results, Microsoft's Bing search engine made a similar announcement that it will start including a user's social media "likes" with results.

This latest announcement builds upon Bing's previous efforts to integrate social media into its search results. Now, whenever a user searches certain terms, results will include any related items his or her friends have liked on Facebook. Such results will be accompanied by a thumbnail image of the friend.

"As people spend more time online and integrate their offline and online worlds, they will want their friends' social activity and their social data to help them in making better decisions," Lawrence Kim, from Microsoft's Bing social team, wrote for a company blog post.

Last year, Microsoft incorporated information from users' Twitter accounts into search results.

Google, the online search market leader, now incorporates posts from websites, such as Flickr, YouTube and Twitter, into its search results. Privacy settings on Facebook don't allow information from the site to be incorporated