Facebook ends partnership with Bing search engine

Facebook no longer displays Bing search results on its website. Instead, the social networking site only uses its own search engine from now on.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that Microsoft’s partnership with Bing will be discontinued. Search results from Microsoft’s search engine are no longer shown in Facebook. The reason for this is that the company behind the social networking site wants to emphasize content that can be found on Facebook, so that web results no longer have a place in the search engine.

Facebook itself has been working on improving its own search technology for some time now. For example, it recently came up with the ‘social’ search engine Graph Search, which can be used to ask contextual search queries. It has also recently become possible to search posted messages. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously said that more than a trillion messages have been placed on the site, which means that there is more content to search than with competing search engines, according to the CEO. So it seems that Facebook itself wants to become a full-fledged search engine.

Despite the fact that the search results of Bing are no longer shown, Facebook would like to continue the collaboration with Microsoft. What this means in practice is not clear. Microsoft still shows Facebook content in the Bing search engine.