Facebook Search Changes 2014: Microsoft Bing No Longer a Part of Facebook's Graph Search
Microsoft Bing search engine results are no longer used on Facebook's Graph Search product, reports Reuters.
The company announced an update to improve Graph Search so that users can use keywords to search for specific individual posts as well as other users and pages.
In a statement to Venture Beat, a Facebook spokesperson said, "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 Microsoft spokesperson told Venture Beat, "We continue to partner with Facebook in many different areas."
The Verge reports that Bing's January 2013 integration with Facebook was seen as an important way for Microsoft to compete with Google's search engine. It seemed to benefit Facebook as well by allowing users the option to conduct a web search powered by Bing if what they were looking for, such as local weather, was not offered by the social media platform's Graph Search.
"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," Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a January 2013 press event held at the Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
Microsoft claims that the change happened "a while ago," and the fact no one noticed until now is a clear indication that Facebook is not considered a popular web search engine. The change clarifies that Graph Search is nothing more than a way to track down social information, such as the girl who sat next to you in your college math class. Graph Search is strictly a semantic search engine designed to provide answers to natural language queries from within a Facebook user's network of friends.
Graph Search is crucial for Facebook's 1.35 billion users as they attempt to hunt down friends or locate other types of information on the online social networking service.
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