NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Microsoft is launching a major overhaul of its also-ran search engine Bing on Thursday, aiming at a weakness it sees in market leader Google.
The most prominent new element in Bing's redesign is "Sidebar," a social search feature that scours users' social networks to surface information relevant to their search queries.
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Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) unveiled a similar feature dubbed"Search Plus Your World" in January to decidedly mixed reviews. Though some of the basic features are the same, Microsoft (MSFT,Fortune 500) thinks it has a better solution.
Like Google, Bing's Sidebar will display posts from people in your social networks who have recently discussed a topic related to what you just searched for. A search for "San Francisco restaurants" will return posts from your friends talking about good eats in the city.
That's where the similarities end.
Google's "social search" only displays Google+ posts -- something thatFacebook and Twitter are cranky about. It's a walled garden that fences users inside Google's proprietary network.
Bing's Sidebar works with multiple social networks, including Facebook, Twitter and Google+. It stashes its social search results off to the right side of the page, while Google plops them right into the middle of its main results.
Bing's strategy is pointedly different than that of Google, which is laser-focused on building its own social network. Though Google+ has grown to nearly 100 million users, analysts are still trying to determine how active and engaged they actually are.
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