With Facebook Search, the company is quite happy in managing its over a trillion status updates, text posts, photos, and other pieces of contents. And for that, Facebook is quietly dropping Bing to focus more on its own search engine product.
The news comes over a year after Facebook began including Bing in its Graph Search results. And to prove that search can power the future of Facebook, the social network company has been heavily focused on improving its own search engine.
After going against YouTube with its own video platform, the social network is continuing its competition in Google's territory with a more aggressive move. By dumping Microsoft Bing as a feature for its Search, Facebook is aiming something bigger: being an alternative to the internet's search engine.
"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's spokesperson. "We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft in lots of different areas."
Facebook and Microsoft have both been partners for several years. Back in 2006, Microsoft sold banner ads on Facebook for U.S. users. A year later, Microsoft invested $240 million for 1.6 percent stake at $15 billion valuation. As a part of the investment, Microsoft has the rights for having a spit advertisement revenue on Facebook outside of the U.S.. In 2010, Facebook removed Microsoft's banner as it moved to take more control of its advertising business, replacing it with Bing search results to international versions of its service.
When first launching Graph Search in January 2013, Facebook's goal was to give its users the ability to find their way through contents using natural language queries. The product came from Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky which are two former Google executives that work for Facebook to develop Graph Search.
Facebook's move to focus on its own search engine is a decision that reflects the increasing importance of web search technology, a market that is dominated by Google. But Facebook, meanwhile, is not aiming to compete with Google on the web as the social giant is already pleased by making a search engine within the walls of its 1.35 billion users.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has said that search is one of the company's key growth initiatives, noting that in July 2014, there were more than 1 billion search queries occurring on the social network each day.
Facebook is confident that with its massive amount of distributed information inside the company's "walled garden", Facebook would eventually replace the need of web searches for answers to certain questions.
"There is 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," said Zuckerberg said on a conference call.
Despite being one of the most highlighted feature on the social network, Facebook that is no longer showing Bing's search result cones the admittance that Facebook's Search is not at all the default search engine for most people. But Search is still it's main core feature that the company aims to further develop. The company has made changes to Search by bringing better capabilities to Android and the web, as well as making it more intuitive.
As a further enhancement to mark Facebook's move toward making a better search engine that its competitors, Facebook Search will no longer return web results, only results from around Facebook itself.
The efforts by the social giant is suggesting that the company is beginning to feel strong enough about its own search engine. Its renewed efforts in Search could boost engagement in a short-term, and ultimately increase the company's monetization ability. We won't be surprised that one day, Facebook may develop its own search engine to crawl the World Wide Web.
