Facebook has announced its own internal search engine, which it is calling Graph Search. However, the company will also be incorporating web search results with its new system.
As part of its press event today, Engadget reports that Facebook will be using Microsoft"s Bing service which will add web site results alongside Facebook"s Graph Search results. Bing will be used if someone using Graph Search on Facebook wants to learn about, for example, the local weather. Those results will come from Bing"s engine.
Zuckerberg stated, ""We don"t think people will be coming to us exclusively for web search, but we wanted to provide good search results in Graph Search." During a Q&A, Facebook team member Lars Rasmussen stated, "There"s an integration between Bing and Graph Search so that Bing picks up when Graph can"t deliver relevant results."
Facebook also confirmed that Microsoft is helping Facebook with the development of Graph Search. Asked why they didn"t go with Google, Zuckerberg stated, "We would love to work with Google. We just wanted to incorporate search, and as long as the companies are willing to honor the privacy of folks sharing content on Facebook, we"ll work with them. We just haven"t gotten it worked out with Google yet."
With over one billion Facebook users, adding in Bing search results to the website will be a massive boost for Microsoft as it tries to gain more market share from Google. Bing already powers the search engine for Yahoo, which is still the third biggest Internet search engine in the US.
Source: Engadget | Image via Engadget