Bing Powering Facebook’s Search

Bing has had a relationship with Facebook since 2008, and it has just become more involved. The latest announcement regarding Bing’s relationship to Facebook appeared on Bing’s blog on the 5th of this month.

Briefly, web search through Facebook will continue to be developed, including the integration of more of Bing’s features, and this will be rolled out both in and outside of the USA. Facebook will provide all display advertising within their site; however, Microsoft will continue to provide the search ads. In the whole post, it is the following paragraphs that I find the most interesting:

Bing will continue to exclusively power the web search results on Facebook. This change will also enable Microsoft to continue its focus on driving strong performing campaigns across our own social media and communications tools, including Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail, and via rich content environments across MSN and Xbox Live.

This is an exciting time for us as we continue to work with Facebook on great new experiences for customers. As you know, Bing has been very focused on helping customers make important decisions. We believe that counsel from family and friends can be a big part of that process. Going deeper in web search experiences with Facebook, in addition to the collaboration we announced last October about bringing public data from Facebook’s API into the search experience, will enable us to do great things together for our customers.

By providing Facebook with its websearch functionality, Bing can get around the strong Google brand, and get its search tools in front of people where they already are, rather than attempting to change existing habits the hard way. Bing’s features are comparable to what Google provides through their search experience, and Bing’s intent to become a decision engine and their integration of Wolfram Alpha has a lot of potential.

When you stop and consider the social networks that Microsoft is already heavily invested in, working with Facebook makes a lot of sense. The quote: “…bringing public data from Facebook’s API into the search experience…” is interesting in what it points to. Google is leveraging their own social data through Gmail, Google Reader, etc, to further enhance their own search results, and to provide a better ad product.

How Bing will use the data is collects from Facebook will be very interesting. As a recommendation engine, Facebook is incredibly effective, and the volume of data that they collect is very cool, or very scary, depending on your views. Data mining how links, information, video and photos are shared, tagged and recommended would be invaluable for Bing. Between these announcements and the development of Google Social, search will be a very different place in five years time, at the latest.

It is very silly to write off Microsoft too quickly. While they did release Vista and they have gone through anti-trust litigation, they still have considerable resources, and large companies can still be creative and agile.