Microsoft's Bing collaborates with Facebook
Benny Evangelista, Chronicle Staff |
By turning Bing into a social search engine, Microsoft Online Services Division President Qi Lu said it was the "unfolding of a new era of search," and added that the partnership will "make people first-class citizens of the search experience."
Microsoft is trying to leverage the power of Facebook, which has more than 500 million registered members worldwide, to elevate its Bing search engine. The partnership also elevates the growing rivalry between Palo Alto's Facebook Inc. and Mountain View's Google, which has long stood as the king of online search.
Microsoft in 2007 became one of Facebook's early investors, paying $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the then-fledgling social network.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he preferred to work with Microsoft because the Redmond, Wash., software giant is the "underdog" in search.
"I couldn't think of anyone better to work with on the next generation of search," Zuckerberg said during a press conference at Microsoft's Mountain View campus.
The Facebook-Bing collaboration is the latest instance of an outside site using Facebook's Instant Personalization feature that was introduced earlier this year.
Access to Facebook
When someone uses Bing and is logged into his or her Facebook account, the Bing site will have access to whatever information the Facebook member has chosen to make public in his or her profile, just as they would while logged into Facebook itself, Zuckerberg said.
The two companies announced two features in what they called Bing Social that were rolling out immediately, starting with "liked results." People using Bing will see search results that include relevant links and topics that are "liked" by Facebook members, including news stories, videos and other information shared by their Facebook network.
And Web searches for people will also call up information from Facebook profiles.
'Just the beginning'
"This is just the beginning," said Dan Rose, Facebook vice president of partnerships and platform marketing. Rose said Facebook and Microsoft began talking about the new integration less than two months ago.
"These are just the first few things that we are able to do," he said.
Analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group of San Mateo said Bing's new social search "hits Google right between the eyes."
"Google has recently been making noises that it wants access to Facebook's social graph, calling for the company to be more open," Li said in a blog post. "That's because Google realizes that unless it can harness social graph data, it will be relegated to traditional algorithmic search based primarily on the information on the Web page itself and scrapping what social data it can."
She also said that tools like search engine optimization, used by websites to get higher search rankings, will lose relevance because social signals will have greater influence on those rankings.
But analyst Ray Valdes of Gartner Research said he doesn't believe the partnership is a "game-changer." Google should remain dominant in search, although Bing might gain more users.
"The real importance of today's announcement is that it highlights the emerging strategic conflict between Facebook and Google," Valdes said in an e-mail. "Today's announcement follows last-week's launch of Facebook Groups, which was a pre-emptive strike against an upcoming Google initiative."
New versus old
Valdes said the Facebook-Microsoft partnership also "highlights the growing fault line in the landscape of the modern Web. There is a long-term competition between the new and the old, between Facebook as the early leader in the social web and Google as the dominant player in the content web. Everyone else, such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Twitter, are playing secondary roles, and will start lining up on one side or the other."
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