Bing has recently added a new section to their Bing Search results titled “Trending on social networks about <keywords>”

These seem restricted to simply Facebook and Twitter, as I did not find any examples that including Google+, Instagram or Pinterest, the remaining most-popular social networks.

They don’t seem to be showing up for every topic you’d think would be trending on social media, but they do seem to favor examples that might not have many other additions to the search results, such as local results, knowledge graphs or answer boxes.

They do seem to only be pulling social media from verified accounts, which should help prevent the possibility of inappropriate content showing up accidentally.

The main link for each trending social media listing actually goes to the sharers website and not to the tweet or Facebook post, which I am sure many will be surprised about.  To actually see the post, you would need to click the “See on Twitter” or “See of Facebook” links instead.

This is a nice addition, but not one I am sure would be used all that often outside a current event – whether celebrity gossip or actual news – happening.  And while some of the content is only a couple of hours old, it seems to favor older content.

There doesn’t seem to need to be too much interaction for it to trigger – the Kate Upton Huffington Post example only had 6 retweets and 5 favorites.

Yahoo is not currently displaying the “trending on social networks” section in their own search results.

This is another tweak that Bing has made to their search results that Google has not implemented at all.