Facebook graph teams up with Microsoft Bing: Should Google care?

Facebook and Microsoft have teamed together to provide a more social search experience, but even together can they challenge the might of Google?

Facebook's newly launched Graph Search does not give web results. The results are based not on web queries but on answers and information that your friends share on Facebook. Graph Search currently gives answers based on Photos, People, Places and Interests. For anything else that you ask Graph Search, the answers will be based from Bing results. Bing is the world's number two search engine and is owned by Microsoft.

But inclusion in Graph Search isn't the only boost that Bing got this week. According to a new blogpost Bing announced that it was getting social updates from Facebook as well. What does this mean?

Well now Facebook updates, photos, etc from your friends will be part of your personalised Bing search results. But you will have to connect your account to the search engine of course.

Today's blogpost reads,

Starting today, five times more of your friends' content on Facebook is searchable in the sidebar – including status updates, shared links, comments and photos from your friends. With the addition of status updates, shared links and comments to the sidebar, it's now easier to see who knows and what they've shared related to your search. So when your friends aren't around, Bing is the perfect stand-in.

Bing has introduced a new sidebar to the right which will show your friends latest status updates and photos. The option to connect your Facebook account to Bing is on the the upper right corner of the screen. Bing also promises that it will respect Facebook privacy settings and won't show any information that your friends have marked private.

This is pretty similar to what Google does with Google Plus currently. If you are browsing Google and are logged into your Google account, results from your Google Plus feed are also a part of the search results. Of course Google Plus is also used largely by brands, and celebrities and doesn't often generate the kind of personal content that users on Facebook share.

Social Search on Bing. Image from Bing

As far as Bing and Graph Search are concerned, Derrick Connell, Corporate Vice President of Search for Bing wrote,

As part of this product, our two engineering teams worked together to advance a unified search experience. That means that when people want to search beyond Facebook, they see web search results from Bing with social context and additional information such as Facebook pages.

To the Facebook user, they will not only see useful results, but we think have serendipitous experiences.

The Facebook-Bing relationship is clearly trying to take on Google with its new strategy by combining their collective powers. But the problem is that people might not always be comfortable seeing their Facebook updates, or data getting reflected on Bing. Also in view of Facebook's complicated privacy design which can leave everyone confused, Bing results might end up reflecting what we don't want showing up on a search engine.

Will Facebook-Bing ever pose a threat to Google? Most analysts don't think so. Privacy on Facebook has always been a complicated issue but unless people willingly share their personal information on the social networking site, it won't be the data mine that Google is. Most people want to restrict their information, photos etc to their friends list.

Nor does Bing have the kind of market share that Google currently does. According to arecent comscore report, Google controls 66.7 percent of US search engine market as of Decemeber 2012. Microsoft sites have a market share of 16.3 percent in the US.

While social updates from Facebook are a strong move on part of Bing to challenge Google's dominance, most will remain skeptic about its ability to beat Google.