NEW YORK: Both Facebook and Microsoft officials have confirmed that the social networking giant has officially dropped Bing from its search results.
That’s not to say that Microsoft and Facebook are splitting up for good, though. They’ll still work together in other ways, just not with Facebook’s search capabilities.
“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,” said a Facebook spokesperson in a statement sent to Venture beat. “We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft in lots of different areas.”
As the spokesperson somewhat alluded to, Facebook is now using more of its own internal search to let users find information within Facebook. As the company recently announced, Facebook users can now search through back Facebook posts for things they’ve talked about. The feature is slowly rolling out to Facebook’s 1+ billion users, so don’t worry just yet if you haven’t been given the little popup notification that the feature is ready for you to use.
According to a Microsoft spokesperson, Facebook allegedly made the switch away from Bing some time ago.
“Facebook recently changed its search experience to focus on helping people tap into information that’s been shared with them on Facebook versus a broader set of web results. We continue to partner with Facebook in many different areas,” reads a statement from one of its spokespeople.
The move probably won’t affect Bing all that negatively, however. While we don’t know how many Facebook-started searches typically end up going to Bing, Microsoft’s search engine currently enjoys almost a 20-percent market share versus the competition. That puts it in second place, but a distant second place, behind Google and its 67-percent market share at least, according to the latest figures from Comscore.
And Bing is still the search engine powering Yahoo’s listings at least, unless Yahoo finds some way to creatively negotiate its way out of that deal.
