Just about 24 hours after announcing their search partnership deal with Twitter, Bing has gone ahead and finalised a similar deal with Facebook, according to reports from the Telegraph.
The Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, has confirmed the deal, and she says that the feature is likely to be launched within the next two months. She has however reassured Facebook users that their privacy will be respected and therefore, Facebook will only stream data from those users who have their privacy settings mentioned as ‘everyone on web’. In fact sorting out this public data from the more private one is the reason, it will take about 2 months to launch this new feature.
Ms. Sandberg has also confirmed that Facebook will not be receiving any monetary compensation for allowing Bing to access their data. In due course of course, it is reasonable to expect that the increased access of Facebook data will lure more marketers and advertisers to Facebook. Thus indirectly this deal between Facebook and Bing is sure to help Facebook to earn more money.
The deal should also help Bing to boost its market share in the search market as they have managed to get these deals through before Google. Bing search results are now likely to be more real-time based than those on Google thus attracting more customers to Bing.
At the same time, Bing must make sure that they do not just clutter up their search results by adding data from Twitter and Facebook. That would only serve to confuse users, instead of providing better quality search results, which is the aim of these partnerships.
