Facebook has stopped showing Bing search results on its social media website.
The move was confirmed by a Facebook spokesperson, with the feature being removed when the company revamped its search offerings, now allowing users to find past posts from their friends.
"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 the spokesperson.
Microsoft also offered a statement, saying that it will continue to work with Facebook in different areas.
Bing's integration with Facebook was first announced in January 2013, many seeing it as a way for Microsoft to compete with Google. As well as users being able to search for things on Facebook itself, they were also able to find things like local weather. Despite this, Bing's search capabilities were not core to Facebook itself.
The relationship between the two companies goes further back than 2013, however. In 2007, when Facebook was still rather small, Microsoft invested $240 million in the social media network.
"We don't think a lot of people will come to Facebook to do web searches, but if we can't find what you're looking for, it's good to have this," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an interview when Bing was incorporated into Facebook's search engine.
It took a few days for most to realize that Facebook wasn't displaying Bing search results anymore, a testimony to the fact that few thought of Facebook as a default search engine over the likes of Google or even Bing.
While Bing results will no longer appear, Zuckerberg still firmly believes that search is an important initiative for the company. In July there were over 1 billion search queries taking place on Facebook every day, suggesting that all the information shared on Facebook could eventually replace the need to search other areas of the web for certain 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," said Zuckerberg in July.
The move by Facebook was expected. The company has been developing its own search technology, aimed at helping users find information from within Facebook. It is, however, a blow to Microsoft. Google accounts for around 67 percent of the search market share, with Bing accounting for around 19.5 percent, Yahoo with 10.3 percent, Ask Network with 1.9 percent and AOL with 1.2 percent, according to comScore's October search rankings report. It is not clear how much the move will affect Microsoft's market share in search.
