Facebook to end collaboration with Bing for web search results

Social networking site Facebook has decided to end its four-year web search collaboration with Bing.

Bing's parent Microsoft has a stake in Facebook since 2007 (See:Microsoft pips Google to acquire a stake in Facebook).

A spokesman for Facebook said, the company was not currently showing web search results in Facebook Search as it was focused on helping people find what had been shared with them on Facebook.

Confirming the development, a spokesman for Microsoft said Facebook recently changed its search experience to focus on helping people tap into information that had been shared with them on Facebook vs a broader set of web results.

Both companies had stressed, however,  that they would continue to partner in other ventures.

The break off has not been a sudden development, as Facebook had been working on a search technology of its own. With the technology, it was trying to make Facebook more user friendly, as it would focus exclusively on searches within the social networking site.

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg had attached great importance to the search feature, and also expected that search, along with Whatsapp, and Facebook's Instagram photo messaging service would reach 1 billion users within 5 years.

Meanwhile, Venture Beat reported that the social networking giant earlier this week launched its own tool for finding comments and other information.

Search is vital for the social network's 1.35 billion users as they attempted to find friends or locate all kinds of other information on the site.

In a statement to VentureBeat, a Facebook spokesperson said, ''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.''

But, ''We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft in lots of different areas.''

A Microsoft spokesperson told VentureBeat that Facebook had recently changed its search experience to focus on helping people tap into information that had been shared with them on Facebook versus a broader set of web results.

He said the company continued to partner with Facebook in many different areas.

According to the Microsoft spokesperson, Facebook's move happened a while ago.