Facebook no longer shows Web results for its Facebook Search feature; instead, it shows results from items posted within the social networking site.
"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," an FB spokesperson told Reuters.
The newly-revamped Facebook Search lets users find comments or posts published by their friends on the platform. Reuters notes that this move could be an indication that the company is recognizing more the importance of search technology. In July, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that 1 billion searches were made on the site each day, and search is being tapped as a key growth initiative for the company.
"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," the online publication quotes Zuckerberg as saying.
The move has raised the question about the company's relationship with Microsoft, the owner of search engine Bing, which FB has relied on for search results in the past few years. But while CNet notes that the relationship between Facebook and Microsoft is not as strong as it once was, the two giant tech firms have nonetheless confirmed that they remain as partners in other areas. Facebook is merely narrowing its scope of search results to those within the site rather than encompassing the content of the Web.
A Microsoft representative said in a statement, "Facebook recently changed its search experience to focus on helping people tap into information that's been shared with them on Facebook versus a broader set of Web results."
The report from CNet also shares ComScore's findings. According to the industry research company, Google remains as the top search engine, performing 67 percent of Web searches as of October. Bing, on the other hand, had a 20 percent share in the market. Facebook's move to stop using Bing could affect Microsoft's figures, and its entry into the arena, confined as it currently is to its own boundaries, could pose a major challenge to existing search engines, especially when it decides to expand its scope.
