Facebook quietly drops Microsoft's Bing from its search engine

Facebook has stopped to show web search results from Microsoft's Bing on its social networking site. The action will put an end to a four year long agreement of Microsoft and Facebook. However, the two firms will continue their partnership in other areas.

This step by Facebook indicates that it is starting to find a way to develop its own web search technology in order to compete with rival Google.

"We're not currently showing web search results in Facebook Search because we're focused on helping people find what's been shared with them on Facebook," a company spokesperson told Reuters. "We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft in lots of different areas."

Mark Zuckerberg has indicated that search is one of Facebook’s key strategic growth initiatives. As Zuckerberg noted at an event in July 2014, there were more than 1 billion search queries on Facebook every day and that the enormous amount of information users share within Facebook could eventually replace the need to search the Web for answers to certain questions.