Internet search titan Google is all set to pick up the gauntlet thrown by Microsoft Bing and Facebook when these two companies announced to work together to challenge Google. The integration of Microsoft and Facebook is set to change the face of social search but Google is getting ready for the showdown.
On October 13, world’s largest social networking site Facebook inked a deal with Microsoft to open its data feeds to let Microsoft's Bing search engine index and serve profile information and Liked Results in relevant situations. The integration is definitely bigger than what Google has done with its own Social Search functionality.
Tech website eWEEK reported that the Facebook-Bing deal is a landmark development in the field of social advertising. "Bing can leverage the social info it lacked to keep people on their sites longer, with more exposure to ad inventory and the business it generates," wrote eWEEK.
But Google CEO Eric Schmidt is planning to come up with ways to tackle the competition posed by Facebook and Microsoft. Schmidt said recently that Google is careful about how its signals are assembled, adding there "are ways in which we could do that." "We also have in development other ways in which people can give us that sort of information that can make it even more personal," Schmidt said.
Schmidt is banking on Google Me project to socialize its search and Web service and challenge the Bing and Facebook. Schmidt expressed his unhappiness over the decision of Facebook to cede its data to Microsoft. "There is always a concern that large, private collections of the data are not accessible to Web search engines," Schmidt noted.
