Facebook announced that they will no longer display search results from Bing in Facebook Search, signaling the end of the four-year relationship between Microsoft's search engine and the most popular social networking website.
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed reports about their company's decision to remove Bing in Facebook Search, saying that their company will focus on providing results that were shared by their 1.35 billion users worldwide.
The spokesperson denied, though, that they will completely end their ties with Microsoft, saying that their partnership in other areas will remain the same.
"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," the Facebook spokesperson told Reuters. "We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft in lots of different areas."
Microsoft also confirmed Facebook's decision to end ties with their search engine. A company spokesman said that Facebook informed them they want to focus on helping their users get information that are based on what has been shared on the social networking site instead of relying on a broad search results from the Web through Bing.
The decision came after Facebook made it clear that they have been developing their own search engine, which started when they unveiled "Graph Search" two years ago, which received positive feedback from their users.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been very vocal about the company's desire to improve their search functions in the next several years.
"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 in July.
While the move is big step for Facebook towards attracting more users, it will be a big blow to Bing. Previous reports indicated that the Bing represented just 20 percent of web searches, which is way lower than Google's 67 percent. Bing's share is expected to go down significantly following Facebook's decision to focus on their search engine.
The development also proved that Microsoft and Facebook's relationship is not as solid as it was in 2007 when Microsoft invested $240 million to get a 1.6 percent stake in the company. Microsoft previously provided banner ads on the social networking site, but Facebook decided to stop using it in 2010.
