Facebook has quietly removed Microsoft-owned Bing as its primary search engine, according to a new report.
The social network pulled Bing search from its Graph Search platform in exchange for its own search tool that will allow users to find information related to friends’ posts and comments, Reuters reported.
Facebook was using Bing to produce search results as its in-house search engine, allowing Facebook users to look for more information about their friends. Selecting Bing as a partner was also a way for Facebook to keep rival Google’s search engine away from the social network.
The move comes as Facebook strengthens its other search tools. Earlier this week, it updated the method to search for old Facebook posts. The social network also revamped its trending news section, which makes it easier to find news, and read different perspectives on the day’s most popular stories. What’s more, it added a Twitter-like live feed that includes user mentions.
Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a conference call in July that search is one of Facebook’s main focuses to fuel growth, noting that 1 billion search requests are entered into the site each day.
“There is more than a trillion posts, which some of the search engineers on the team like to remind me, is bigger than any web search corpus out there,” Zuckerberg said.
-mashable