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Facebook Gets Rid Of Bing In Search Results

Last week, Facebook began rolling out an update to its search experience, finally enabling users to search keywords and get actual posts from their network. One part of the update that the company did...
Facebook Gets Rid Of Bing In Search Results
Written by Chris Crum
  • Last week, Facebook began rolling out an update to its search experience, finally enabling users to search keywords and get actual posts from their network. One part of the update that the company didn’t exactly announce, but that some have noticed, is that the search experience no longer includes web results from Bing .

    Facebook and Bing have been partners for years. In addition to Facebook getting some special treatment in Bing’s own results, Bing has been the supplier of supplemental search results in Facebook searches. When no actual content from Facebook was a right fit for a search, web results from Bing were offered as kind of a last resort for information retrieval.

    It’s unclear how often people actually used these Bing results from Facebook searches. My guess is not very. I can only speak for myself, but I can probably count the times I’ve relied on these results for finding something on one hand. Maybe less.

    Facebook appears to not value them much either. Now, when you search Facebook for something, you’re presented with these options: Posts, People, Photos, Pages, Places, ,Groups, Apps, and Events. If you can’t find what you’re looking for from those options, why are you even searching on Facebook to begin with? That seems to be the mentality of Facebook.

    Apparently Facebook’s relationship with Microsoft hasn’t completely ended. Reuters shared a statement from the social network:

    “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,” a company spokesperson told Reuters. “We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft in lots of different areas.”

    I guess Facebook has the upper hand in that relationship. It gets its content on Microsoft’s search engine, and Microsoft gets…the privilege of showing Facebook content to its users?

    Image via Facebook

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