Facebook has quietly dumped Microsoft’s Bing search engine from its Graph Search results. This comes as the social network is looking towards search as an important area of future growth for itself.
As Reuters first pointed out, the recent update to Facebook’s Graph Search no longer includes web results which have until now been powered by Microsoft’s search engine. The updated version of Graph Search now highlights past posts shared with users and more info from their friends partially negating the need for an extended web search. A Facebook spokesperson said:
We’re not currently showing web search results in Facebook Search because we’re focused on helping people find what’s been shared with them on Facebook. We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft in lots of different areas.
The two companies have worked together for a long time now, ever since Microsoft’s initial investment in the social network back in 2007. However Facebook has been slowly becoming an independent player online and it looks to be moving into the search scene where its 1.3 billion users can represent an important asset.
Facebook founder/creator Mark Zuckerberg highlighted the company’s interest in search back in July when, in a conference calls, he mentioned: “There is (sic) more than a trillion posts, which some of the search engineers on the team like to remind me, is bigger than any Web search corpus out there”.
Whether Facebook does indeed move towards competing in the search scene probably remains to be seen in the future but if the company decides to do so their biggest obstacle won’t be Microsoft, but Google.
Source: Reuters
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