Mozilla's Firefox may have dumped Google for Bing-powered Yahoo! search, but Google isn't the only search engine being dumped around here.
Reuters reports that Facebook has quietly dropped adding search results from Microsoft's Bing to its Graph Search feature, a move that actually took place when Facebook rolled out changes for its search functionality for desktop and mobile at the start of the week. Facebook has confirmed that it has stopped incorporating Bing into its own search algorithm.
"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. "We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft in lots of different areas."
The two companies have a long-standing relationship dating back to 2007, when the software leader invested $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the then-fledgling startup. With Facebook currently valued at $211 billion, Microsoft clearly has plenty to like about its remaining partnership with the social network.
"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," said a Microsoft spokesperson. "We continue to partner with Facebook in many different areas."
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has named search as one of the most important growth areas for the company, noting in July that more than 1 billion searches were made and implying that people could eventually eschew Google, Bing and other search engines and prefer Facebook to search for information.
"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," Zuckerberg told analysts in a conference call in July.
However, the fact that pretty much nobody immediately noticed that Facebook search dropped Bing almost a week ago indicates that not too many people care about what search on Facebook offers them.
Earlier this week, Facebook vice president of search Tom Stocky announced that Facebook has revamped Graph Search so that users can directly search for older posts by themselves or by other users. Previously, users could only search using a certain format, such as "high school classmates in North Carolina who like French fries." With the new search, Facebook users can now search for things such as "Aunt Donna's doughnut recipe" and "Jack's graduation party."
