Facebook and Bing Join Hands to compete with Google

On October 14, Facebook announced that it will partner with Microsoft to allow the latter’s Bing to become its default search engine. This will make the world’s largest social network even more potent. It has more than 500 million users and Microsoft’s Bing, though it never made even a dent into Google’s search leadership, is not a walkover — it genuinely has tremendous potential, especially with specialised search.

Therefore, more than any other partnership that Microsoft has gotten into to capture Google’s marketshare, it is this that would scare the folks at Mountain View, California the most.

Take the numbers. Facebook’s 500+ million users can now search for a restaurant or a movie and Bing will tell them if any of their friends “likes” it. If Bing produces a killer search product for Facebook, Google might as well as say goodbye to a large number of its daily users thus severely denting its advertising revenue model which brought in more than $ 20 billion last year.

So, on Google, if you search for a film critic’s view on a new release, you would get only that critic’s views. Not on Bing, which will now feature your friends’ comments as well. It is more than likely that we watch movies based not upon the often esoteric and distant opinion of a critic but that of a genuine friend with whom we perhaps share greater commonality.

Another plus: “ Now when you search on Bing, rather than showing you all the Matthew Kims (a potential friend) out there, Bing finds and provides the results most relevant to you based on your Facebook connections — those with whom you have mutual friends will now show up first," said Facebook CEO and cofounder Mark Zuckerberg. He added that “ Bing is also making more prominent the ability to add these people as friends on Facebook directly from Bing.” This collaboration will therefore have two distinct advantages. It will drive traffic to Bing it so desperately needs to increase its unique visitors as well as revenue.

To Facebook, it will mean additional revenue to help aid its remarkable growth story. Google normally is not affected by tie-ups that potentially want to kill it. For example, in August this year, Microsoft and Yahoo — Google’s two biggest challengers — joined hands on search. No go.

Google still has 73 per cent of the US online search market. By September, Yahoo had a mere 13.54 per cent and Bing just 10 per cent. The tie- up had actually brought down Yahoo’s share by five percent while Bing saw only a two per cent rise. Clearly, it had not worked.

Then, in September, Google launched Instant worldwide and in October it had an India launch. Instant allows users to see the search results page as they type rather than wait for the entire string to be typed. Chances are that Google’s marketshare may bump up further this month.


Now, however, Bing can deliver results based on what your trusted sources of information— your friends and acquaintances— think. This is a giant leap forward.” Google has for long dominated the search world. But when it comes to social networking, it has failed miserably so far with Wave and Buzz (Wave is dead and Buzz too may go the same way). It is this drawback that might help Facebook and Microsoft.