Microsoft and Facebook are expanding their mutual cooperation some more as announced on the Bing Search blog. Specifically Microsoft will continue to provide Facebook users full access to Bing features through the Microsoft-powered Facebook search facility. So, soon instead of just giving set of links, Facebook will now provide richer answers as well as other tools to enable Facebook members make faster and smarter decisions.
In addition, the Bing-Facebook search integration will now be implemented across Facebook’ s 400 million members worldwide.
But perhaps the biggest surprise of all is the said “mutual” decision by the two companies about their display ad deal. Facebook is now taking over the responsibility for selling display advertisements on its own site while Microsoft will continue to serve search ads. This probably explains why the Facebook home page search bar is now prominently located at the top-most center of the site.
It is clearly a compromise which perhaps could lead to positive gains for both. Facebook has been working hard on its advertising program particularly display ads so this move is pretty logical. As for Microsoft, this would give them more focus on what they do best for Facebook – providing better search experience to Facebook members as well as let them focus on the previous agreement to bring Facebook data to Bing’s search results through the Facebook API.
