Yesterday’s announcement of the partnership between Bing and Facebook to deliver a more personalized search has me thinking.

First, I should say that I’m really excited about the prospect of enhanced search to provide more relevant results based on my friends’ “likes.” It’s a huge step toward the concept of social search that many of us have been waiting for, and I think it will rock the world of many SEO analysts who have been making a respectable living helping their clients optimize websites. But this is only the beginning.

Here’s the thought that kept me up last night:  I spend only a small percentage of my online time looking for things on a personal front, but a whole lot more of my time searching, reading and liking content related to work topics  -- most of which I don’t really care whether my “friends” like or not. (No offense, friends.) However, it matters a whole lot to me what work topics my colleagues have “liked.”

True, there is overlap between my purely social relationships and many of the insightful colleagues I’ve also friended on Facebook, but I’m one of those odd people who actually segments between social friends and professional connections. Unless we’ve shared a meal or a drink together at some point, I’m not likely to friend a colleague on Facebook, but I definitely do want to maintain our connection through a professional network like LinkedIn.

So, where am I going with this? While Bing is leveraging Facebook data to determine who the “experts” are in my social graph, their approach does not help me at all if I’m searching tech articles or trends in mobile marketing. The best it will do for me is reveal that some of my friends may have an interest in a few of the same topics.

The killer app will be one that can tap into my personal social graph (via Facebook) when I’m looking for a great pair of shoes or planning my next vacation AND automatically knows to tap into my professional social graph (via LinkedIn, for example) when I’m searching for work-related content. Now THAT would be cool!

-- Adina “Like Me” Dahlin, VP, director of digital experience