Facebook appears to be battening down the hatches as far as its hotly anticipated battle for search supremacy with Google is concerned, with its culling of Microsoft’s Bing feature Facebook’s latest move in a virtual cold war between the two online gargantuan companies.

Though stressing that their partnership with Microsoft is still very much in tact, Facebook inferred in a statement that they want Facebook users to derive noteworthy information from its own branded search engine, through what has been shared with them and their friends.

Facebook will hope that this move is the first step in smoothening out the quality of results users will be provided with, using its glut of data such as comments, status updates and more niche posts such as reviews to inform searchers – as such external results, even from a trusted partner in Microsoft, are no longer pertinent to the direction Facebook is taking.

‘1 billion search queries a day’

Facebook founder and general all-pervasive pioneer, Mark Zuckerberg, has stated his intention for Facebook to tread where no search engine has treaded before – on the toes of Google; and in order to turn this conjecture into reality, Bing and its substandard lack of innovation – when compared with Google – needed to be dispensed with.

With origination and revolution at the forefront of his mind, Zuckerberg set about renovating Facebook’s search programme, harnessing a greater focus on its own data gathered from users very own insights through their posts on the social networking site itself on the back of its Facebook Graph feature.

Termed Facebook Search, the search initiative has been rolled out to US Facebook users already, and is expected to be made available to the global Facebook community in the early part of 2015.

“With 1 billion queries a day and a trillion posts in the Facebook corpus, search is already a meaningful activity on Facebook today. In the early part of last week, FB announced a revamp of its search offering with the goal of making Search on Facebook more intuitive, i.e., easier to find old posts, photos, videos, etc,” said Arvind Bhatia, an analyst at Sterne Agee.

“In addition, over the weekend, FB stopped including Bing search results as part of Graph Search. Also, last week FB refreshed its Trending product, which appears on the right-hand side of each user’s news feed…We think FB’s renewed efforts in Search could boost engagement near-term and ultimately boost monetization for FB. In the long run, we would not be surprised if FB developed its own search engine to crawl the wider web.”

Facebook and Microsoft bond endures

As highlighted by Microsoft’s $240m investment in Facebook in return for a 1.6% stake in the company back in October 2007, the two online companies have enjoyed a fruitful partnership for many years now.

Microsoft enjoyed three years of placing banner ads on Facebook, both in the US and in the wider global community until 2010, when Facebook chose to take the reins on its advertising endeavours and discontinued Microsoft’s banner ad privileges.

Despite this, Microsoft still garners information from Facebook’s social Graph, providing it with a fresh insight into what Facebook users are searching for, enabling Bill Gates’ brainchild to enhance its own algorithms through Facebook’s data.

The move remains a blow to Microsoft’s search bar, Bing, as its 20% state of the market share becomes all the more unstable without the boosted coverage Facebook provides. However, Google will be deliberating how to cope with the potential Facebook harbours within its range of new initiatives all directed at shifting the number one search engine of its throne.