Facebook (FB, Financial) and Microsoft (MSFT, Financial) have had a long lasting relationship dating back to Microsoft’s $240 million investment in the former for a 1.6% stake in the company, way back in October 2007. As a part of the deal, Microsoft had agreed to provide banner ads on Facebook’s website in international markets. However, by 2010, Facebook removed the usage of Microsoft banners ads as it moved to take more control over its advertising business. But at the same point of time, Facebook expanded the use of Microsoft’s Bing search results to international versions of its service. But recently, Facebook has moved out of Bing as well, as conveyed by reliable management sources To Reuters. Let’s get to the crux of the story.
Dropping Bing off the platter
Facebook has stopped including results from Microsoft’s Bing search engine on its social networking site. The move that has been confirmed by company personnel comes as Facebook revamped its own search offerings, introducing a tool that allows users to quickly find past comments and other information posted by their friends on the social networking website.
In fact, Facebook’s move proves that it understands that its web technology needs to be sound enough to offer competition to its rival Google (GOOG, Financial) who dominates in the Web search technology space.
For years till date, Facebook’s search results included links to standalone websites that was provided by Bing. But now the company is emphasizing on having its own in-built tool to focus on helping people find what’s being shared with them on the website. While speaking on this decision taken by Facebook’s management, a company’s spokesperson conveyed to Reuters – “We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft in lots of different areas.”
In July this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had flagged “search” as one of the chief growth initiatives of the company and he had further noted that Facebook gets more than 1 billion search queries on a daily basis. Also he hinted that the vast amount of information that users shared within Facebook could eventually replace the need to search the Web for answers to certain questions.
Having tied up with Microsoft’s Bing, the number 2 search engine in the U.S., Facebook has offered competition to the number 1 search provider Google till date. But now, it wants to use its own search tool to challenge Google and has just dropped Bing from being its primary search engine.
Updating its own tool for meeting intense competition
The social network has strengthened its search tool by updating the method of searching for old Facebook posts, revamping its trending news section and by adding a Twitter-like live feed that includes user mentions. Thus it has updated or improved the Graph Search on-site tool to provide better results from the user search that initially expected.
This change does not augur well for Microsoft, but obviously offers better wings to Facebook in the long run. The move is an interesting one, if not one that is surprising. The problem with using Bing to display web search results within Facebook was that it did just display search results from the wider web rather than just Facebook. Though this might sound as a better option for users, the social networking site was afraid that it is under risk of people navigating away from Facebook which could be a hit to the ad business as consumers would stop consuming ads. Hence, it selected to opt for this makeover.
Conclusion
It’s still not clear whether Facebook will start searching on a wider platform and display results and pages in a closely controlled built-in browser. But there is certainly more to witness as we look further down the line. With the unceremonious dumping of Microsoft’s Bing, Facebook is presently under close watch to see how it grows its search engine after having severed all ties with Bing in the coming future.
