Facebook has stopped using Microsoft Bing to power searches via its social network, ending a partnership that spanned almost two years.
What isn’t clear, however, is who broke up with whom.
In January 2013, Facebook launched Graph Search, a search bar at the top of each Facebook page. Type in “friends who live in San Francisco,” and you’ll receive a list of friends (and potential friends) who live in the city. Before now, however, if you typed in a mundane term like “baseball,” Facebook would suggest a list of related terms, but redirect the search to Bing if you insisted on “baseball” itself. No longer.
Now, Facebook insists on using its suggested terms. And trying to come up with a term that it doesn’t index in some form or another (“solenoid,” for example) is pretty difficult.
