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.