Facebook has stopped using Microsoft’s Bing search engine to power search results on its social network.
The move follows the social juggernaut’s recent revamping of its own search offerings which includes introduction of a new tool that lets users quickly find past comments and other information posted by their friends on Facebook.
“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,” said Facebook in a statement to Venture Beat.
“We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft in lots of different areas.”
Microsoft also confirmed the move saying “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.”
Recently Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg flagged search as one of the company’s key growth initiatives, noting in July that there were more than 1 billion search queries occurring on Facebook every day.
“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 on a conference call with analysts in July.
The move comes as a big blow for Microsoft’s Bing search engine which is currently the No.2 Web search provider in the U.S. According to Industry researcher comScore, Google represented 67 percent of Web searches, while Microsoft’s Bing represented nearly 20 percent of the searchers as of October.
