Microsoft’s Bing hopes to use the power of Facebook’s “likes” to help the search engine gain some ground on Google.

Microsoft has launched new features with Facebook that “make it easy to see what people’s Facebook friends like across the Web, incorporate the collective IQ of the Web into their decision-making and conduct conversational searches.”

Bing thinks if it can dish up that info, it will be attractive to people using the search engine, as well as companies trying to reach people online and sell them stuff. The tool also can ad more value to Facebook marketing efforts.

Here’s how Bing explains it:

According to a recent survey conducted by Bing and Impulse Research, 90 percent of people surveyed seek advice from family and friends before making decisions. This “friend effect” is apparent in a majority of decisions and often outweighs other facts because people feel more confident, smarter and safer with guidance from their trusted circle. Today’s search engines don’t solve for this phenomenon, and 80 percent of people surveyed said they will delay making a decision until they can get a friend’s stamp of approval. This decision delay, or the period of time it takes to hunt down a friend for advice, can last anywhere from minutes to days, whether a person is waiting for a call back, text, email or tweet.

Bing also said it can use the info to spot trends and alert people to deals, such as airline tickets:

Perhaps the best conversation is one that helps save money. Flight Deals will automatically send people airfare deals via Facebook for cities they have liked, enabling them to find out about the latest deals.

Microsoft is banking that by partnering with Facebook, Bing might be able to gain some ground on Google, the dominant search engine. Bing saw a slight gain in search market share in April, but not enough to move ahead of Yahoo or gain much ground on search champ Google. Google had 65.4 percent of the U.S. search market in April, according to comScore. Yahoo had 15.9 percent. Bing had 14.1 percent.

Bing also is banking that most people won’t give a second thought to allowing the search engine to access to their friends list, as well as images and other info they have posted on the social networking site.

I wanted to try out the Bing feature on Facebook. But I paused when I was asked if I wanted to allow Bing to access all my data on my Facebook page, “includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I’ve shared with everyone.”