Are Facebook and Microsoft breaking up?
The world's biggest social network has stopped including search results from Microsoft's Bing on its website, a Facebook spokesperson has confirmed to Reuters.
Facebook search got an update revamp earlier this week that will let users search for past comments and posts from their friends; the shift away from Microsoft Web results indicates that Facebook wants to hone its own search technology.
"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," a company spokesperson told Reuters. "We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft in lots of different areas."
An early Facebook investor, Microsoft still holds a "tiny but valuable stake" in the social network, according to CNET. The tech giant invested $240 million in Facebook in October 2007, receiving a 1.6 percent stake in the site.
Microsoft additionally confirmed the change, telling CNET on Friday, "Facebook recently changed its search experience to focus on helping people tap into information that's been shared with them on Facebook vs. a broader set of Web results."
CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has been working on ways for Facebook to branch out from its signature role of keeping friends and families connected, and the site's reach of more than 1 billion search queries daily could be the ticket.
"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 said during a call with analysts in July, as quoted by Reuters.
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