Bing And Facebook Making Search Announcement Tomorrow
Tomorrow morning, Bing and Facebook will be making an announcement regarding new search offerings that make search more social. The exact details of the announcement have not yet been revealed, however we're assuming …
Context & Ripple Effects
Bing has been positioning itself against the incumbent in search since its mid-2009 relaunch, and its partnership with Facebook has been deepening step by step — most visibly with the expanded search cooperation announced in February. A joint announcement from both companies, rather than either alone, signals the next stage of that arrangement rather than a routine product update.
The timing fits Facebook's broader autumn push: Places launched in August, a revamped Groups product arrived days before this announcement was teased, and Microsoft has meanwhile been consolidating its own search economics through the confirmed Bing-Yahoo advertising platform integration. Social signals are the one input Microsoft can get from Facebook that rivals cannot.
First-order effects
- Bing stands to fold Facebook's social graph into its ranking and results presentation, differentiating a search engine that otherwise competes largely on parity with far larger rivals.
- Facebook extends its data footprint beyond its own site into third-party search, monetizing attention it already captures without building a web-scale crawler of its own.
Second-order effects
- With Bing and Yahoo sharing an ad platform, any lift from social signals flows through the combined Microsoft-Yahoo search marketplace, raising the bar for Yahoo's advertisers relative to standalone alternatives.
- Facebook's other October moves — Places for location and the new Groups for sharing circles — give the search integration ready-made structured signals, so each Facebook product launch now compounds the value of the Bing partnership.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, search competition shifts from indexing scale toward exclusive access to identity and social data, making data-sharing alliances between search engines and social platforms the structural moat of the industry.
- Users' query behavior would increasingly be shaped by what their friends have liked or shared, pulling privacy expectations and regulator attention toward how social graphs are used outside the platforms that collected them.
The trend: Search is becoming a contest over proprietary social and identity data, with Microsoft-Facebook cooperation as the leading example of alliance-based differentiation.