Microsoft tried to sell Bing to Facebook

Slashdot reports on the rumor that Microsoft tried to sell its search engine Bing to Facebook.  After all the hype around how much of a leader Microsoft is in the web industry, I find this to be quite funny. (Provided that it’s true, of course.)

Microsoft is not a web company.  It doesn’t think or behave like a web company.  Sure, they can change, but these things don’t happen so fast.  Facebook, on the other hand, is a web company.  They know the difference between Bing search engine and Google search engine.  More so, they are a social company, and they do know the difference between attempting to index the whole web, and receiving users’ Likes and Shares.

While I don’t use Bing myself, I think there is plenty of cool stuff in there.  But problems that it has to solve as a search engine, are much easier to solve with Facebook’s social graphs – things like SPAM, results gaming, relevance, etc.  So for me it’s really not a surprise that Facebook declined the offer.

 

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