Facebook Enters Search Agreement with Microsoft
CNBC reported this morning that in a call with analysts, Microsoft SVP Satya Nadella announced that the company has reached a web search and search advertising agreement with Facebook. Microsoft PR says the deal will go live by the end of the year.
This is a big announcement, as Facebook has to date provided no web search to users. Facebook and Microsoft will work together to design the best integration of Microsoft’s Live Search service for Facebook’s users.
Late last year, Microsoft made a $240 million strategic investment in Facebook at a stratospheric $15 billion valuation. As part of that deal, Microsoft gained rights to sell Facebook’s US and global ad inventory. Since that time, there has been much speculation as to whether the agreement would extend into search.
Now that the Yahoo deal has seemingly fallen apart, Microsoft is even more eager to expand its search footprint against arch rival Google. Google reached a large search agreement with MySpace a few years ago, guaranteeing $900 million in payments over 3.75 years. Since that time, there have been rumors that Google has been dissatisfied with the monetization performance of MySpace’s search traffic.
We’ll see if things turn out differently for Microsoft and Facebook.
September 30th, 2008 at 11:11 am
[...] it’s widely known that Facebook and Microsoft are collaborating on implementing Live Search in Facebook sometime “by the end of the year,” there is another Facebook group at Microsoft that [...]
October 7th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
[...] appears. The search results page shows Live Search results on the resulting page. As part of Microsoft’s partnership with Facebook (which includes the software giant’s $240 million investment in the company last year), [...]
December 1st, 2011 at 3:15 am
[...] entering a search agreement with Microsoft in 2008, Facebook entered the search market itself in June 2010, although it’s too early to [...]
March 13th, 2012 at 1:40 am
[...] longtime partnership Microsoft, where Microsoft is an investor and provided display ads, Bing powers the social network’s internal search engine and other features, and Facebook contributes data to Bing’s own social search [...]