Microsoft DID Try To Sell Bing To Facebook

There's an interesting little news snippet from Business Insider which is claiming that Microsoft may have tried to sell the Bing search engine to Facebook, with the possibility that this might still come off in the future. Microsoft is losing $2.5billion a year with the search engine and that's a huge amount of money, even in Microsoft terms. According to the article, investors are simply not that interested in search, when all it's doing is pulled Microsoft down when they should be concentrating on the Xbox, touch screen technology and software.

Facebook on the other hand is desperate for a proper search engine. They've already made moves into this area, and I recently noticed that the search box on Facebook now says 'Search for anything on Facebook'. That's a very interesting line - does it mean that users can search for anything that is contained within the Facebook world, or does it mean that while you're in Facebook, you can search for anything that you want to? I suspect this is no accident - while we're currently at the former stage, they want to move to the latter statement as quickly as possible.

All in all, another reason why information professionals need to get up to speed with Facebook - it's not about 'friends' any more.

Comments

[Megan Roberts]

There is already some searching outside of Facebook - if you search for something and click on the magnifying class instead of clicking on something, you get Web results from Bing as one of the options (alongside things like Pages, posts etc.)