During a press demonstration at Microsoft's San Francisco offices Bing representatives described the new interface, which will shortly move from private to public beta, as an attempt to offer more direct interaction with "entities" and people.

"We're moving beyond the pages into entities. Those entities are people, places, things and their relationships," said Qi Lu, Microsoft's president of online services.

Using the new interface, query results for seafood restaurants in San Francisco, for example, include a grey column along the side that displays a "people you know who may know" section, with content on the subject shared by the searcher's social network connections, and a "people who know" section that highlights experts on the query topic across social networks.

"In the real world that's how it works: We use search, then we talk to people," Lu said.

The social sidebar integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The company expects to bring in LinkedIn, Quora and Foursquare as well. The user can interact on Facebook directly from the social sidebar. For instance, a user can post a question about a hotel and tag a friend who may have commented on it. The resulting Facebook posts include a link back to Bing's search page. Twitter interactions take the user to a Twitter interface, the company said.