It seems that Facebook quietly removed Bing as its primary search provider over the weekend, announcing plans to debut its own search tool on Monday, according to Reuters.
The report says that Facebook’s new search tool will give users the ability to filter through old comments and other information from friends.
Facebook has been building out its search products for a long time, using Bing as an extra layer to provide results beyond the Interest Graph in an effort to avoid letting rival Google into the system.
A Facebook spokesperson told Reuters: “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. We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft of lots of different areas.”
Microsoft said almost the same thing to VentureBeat: “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. We continue to partner with Facebook in many different areas.”
Search is an incredibly difficult space to delve into, and Facebook’s search products will face their own unique challenges in that the closed network, with over 1 billion active users, is home to more than a trillion posts. Zuck said on an analyst conference call in July that his search engineers often remind him that Facebook represents the biggest web search corpus out there.
It’s a difficult but important obstacle to tackle as Facebook continues to dominate our social imprint on the Internet. The social giant has been around for more than a decade, and thus entire lives have been lived and recorded on Facebook. That content is growing exponentially, and search that is tailored to this specific network will likely be crucial.
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