Facebook drops Microsoft's Bing from Facebook search results
As first reported by Reuters on December 12, Facebook has stopped showing Microsoft Bing search results within Facebook.
Instead, Facebook is now using its own search technology, which is focused on searching Facebook content, rather than Bing.
Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook in 2007. The two companies have worked together on a variety of projects, including advertising initiatives, as well as a deal to incorporate Facebook data into Bing search results.
As of 2013, Facebook was not using Bing to power Facebook's graph search. At that time, Facebook still was using Bing to generate Web search results last year.
Microsoft is continuing to try to expand Bing's charter away from a Web-search-only service. In the past couple of years, Microsoft has been focusing on ways that the company can use Bing's back-end repository and other technologies in other products, such as Office. Microsoft also has been working on making Bing more of a development platform for both internal Microsoft and partner use.
Bing still continues to provide Yahoo search results, including the Yahoo search results inside Firefox on PCs and mobile devices.
Yahoo has been seeking ways to get out of its 10-year search partnership with Microsoft. There's one loophole that could result in Yahoo being able to wriggle out of its deal with Microsoft in 2015, but it's unclear if Yahoo will be able to demonstrate that revenue per search isn't where it should be compared to Google.