Facebook Removes Microsoft Bing from Its Search
Coming on the heels of its decisions to let users extract past posts, Facebook has stopped showing results from Microsoft Bing search.
The news was confirmed by a Facebook spokesperson to Reuters.
"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 spokesperson reportedly said, according to The Times of India.
Facebook searches mostly throw results from within the social network but also included web links scourged through Bing. With the latest move, Facebook wants to focus on tapping the information that exists within itself, which Mark Zuckerberg earlier described as a bigger than any web search 'corpus'.
Facebook's relations with Microsoft grew prominently since 2007 when the latter invested about $ 240 million in the social networking giant to own 1.6 percent stake. Facebook then evaluated at $ 15 billion, has since grown to a $ 211 billion company.
CNET said the move could be a blow to Microsoft which seeks to provide an alternative to Google search. While Bing accounts for 20 % of the search share on the web, Google's share stands at 67 %.
However Microsoft too has stressed it would continue to work with Facebook following latter's decision to discontinue Bing.
"Facebook recently changed its search experience to focus on helping people tap into information that's been shared with them on Facebook vs. a broader set of Web results," Microsoft spokesperson was quoted saying by CNET.
