Facebook Abandons Bing Search

Facebook has recently shown the door to Bing, Microsoft’s search engine as a provider of search services. Instead, the social networking giant has opted to develop their own search engine. Previously, Facebook users had the option to view results from Bing while carrying out a search on the site. Recently, this feature has disappeared.

The decision to shift to its own search engine, based principally on the Social Graph model allows Facebook to render results from comments, photos and other information already present on Facebook’s system. This implies that users searching for a specific topic would be presented with results within Facebook itself.

Both Facebook and Microsoft have confirmed this move and they have pledged for continued partnerships in various other areas. According to Microsoft, the move happened some time ago but the changes became effective only recently.

Mark Zuckerberg had previously voiced out his ambition of making Facebook search become a viable alternative to web searches. The site is already getting over a billion search queries per day. This is by far comparable to a small search engine in itself.

Microsoft and Facebook are however, still maintaining quite a close relationship even though the collaboration is not so significant as it was before. Microsoft was also previously responsible for banner ads on Facebook until the year 2010 when the social network decided to implement the service in-house.

Social Graph, which powers Facebook search function, was introduced to mobile users for the very first time this year via an update brought on the iOS version of Facebook.