Microsoft to place Klout answers higher in Bing search results

Klout, a social media analytics has been on the rise for the past year. Earlier, Klout was known only for ‘Score’ where a score out of 100 is given to those who have added their social networking profiles to Klout (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc). Recently, Klout added a new service called ‘Experts’ which is a bit like Quora but in this case, you are asked to answer a question by Klout.

This week, Micorosft and Klout have announced that these answers will show up at the top of Bing’s search results. This is a result of the partnership between Microsoft and Klout and an investment that Microsoft in Klout business. Klout has been expanding its network of ‘influencers’ so that they can generate answers for more questions and to bulid  more accurate answers. We have to wait and see if this partnership will result in better hits to Bing.

“When we think about our core mission of helping people fully to realize their influence — not just understanding it, from a score perspective, but actually having the impact they want to have — we weren’t quite where wanted to be,” said Joe Fernandez, Klout’s cofounder and CEO. “So we were running a bunch of experiments, and started playing with this notion of Klout experts.”