Microsoft, Facebook In Search Engine Talks
Microsoft and Facebook are negotiating to increase their ties in search, according to anonymous sources speaking to AllThingsD. That strengthened relationship could include feeding data from Facebook’s “Like” button to Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
Microsoft is a longtime investor in Facebook, and the two companies already have an agreement in place to display Facebook’s public status updates on Bing Social. According to the article’s sources, only Facebook users’ “public” information will ever find its way into Microsoft’s search database.
Siphoning anonymous data from Facebook’s “Like” button into Bing could help refine the latter’s search process. Microsoft executives offered similar justification for its 2009 search-and-advertising agreement with Yahoo, which it said would boost the amount of data digested by Bing, increasing its accuracy. The article’s sources emphasized, however, that talks are nowhere close to a finalized deal.
Facebook’s subscriber numbers and ad revenue continue to grow, but at the cost of periodic user uprisings over the Website’s privacy controls and how their personal information is being used to boost that ad revenue. Nonetheless, the model developed by Facebook has managed to spread from the consumer world and into the enterprise, where tech companies such as Salesforce.com now offer applications that connect business users and their information into either open or closed social networks.
According to analytics firm Nielsen, Bing overcame Yahoo in August to become the second-ranked search engine in the United States, with a 13.9 percent market-share.
Microsoft is a longtime investor in Facebook, and the two companies already have an agreement in place to display Facebook’s public status updates on Bing Social. According to the article’s sources, only Facebook users’ “public” information will ever find its way into Microsoft’s search database.
Siphoning anonymous data from Facebook’s “Like” button into Bing could help refine the latter’s search process. Microsoft executives offered similar justification for its 2009 search-and-advertising agreement with Yahoo, which it said would boost the amount of data digested by Bing, increasing its accuracy. The article’s sources emphasized, however, that talks are nowhere close to a finalized deal.
Facebook’s subscriber numbers and ad revenue continue to grow, but at the cost of periodic user uprisings over the Website’s privacy controls and how their personal information is being used to boost that ad revenue. Nonetheless, the model developed by Facebook has managed to spread from the consumer world and into the enterprise, where tech companies such as Salesforce.com now offer applications that connect business users and their information into either open or closed social networks.
According to analytics firm Nielsen, Bing overcame Yahoo in August to become the second-ranked search engine in the United States, with a 13.9 percent market-share.
Bing and Google have spent the last year matching each other feature-for-feature, with only the occasional divergence—Bing, for example, now has an Entertainment Tab with access to movie trailers and games. Any method that allows Bing to import more data into its system would not only increase the accuracy of its search, but also enhance any future features.
