Microsoft and Facebook in talks to bring “Like” information to Bing
With today’s news making it very clear that Google intends to challenge Facebook’s right to the social networking crown with the forthcoming Google Me service, it appears that Microsoft and Facebook might be ready to strike an alliance against a common foe. The two giants are currently in talks that could result in Bing gaining access to anonymized data generated by Facebook users to better personalize search results.
Here’s how the partnership would work. Microsoft’s Bing search engine would gain access to information culled from Facebook’s Like buttons. If the deal goes through, Microsoft would know which webpages users were liking most, and be able to tweak Bing’s algorithms with the results, instead of relying specifically on web-trawling spiderbots.
Microsoft and Facebook are already in bed together, of course: Microsoft invested $240 million into Facebook, and the results are that Live Search powers Facebook. They also, at one point, gained ad platform exclusivity, only to have Facebook pull out of the deal at the last moment. If this Bing deal goes through, though, it will be the most dramatic partnership yet, although privacy issues will forceFacebook to only make information available to Bing that users have already agreed to make public.
Read more at All Things D
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