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Microsoft has announced that the company has expanded its deal with Facebook and will be integrating Microsoft's Live Search into the social network.
This is big news for Live search, which has been languishing behind both Yahoo and Google in the search stakes for some time.
It is understood that Microsoft will utilise this deal to serve up advertising (both traditional and sponsored search results) through Facebook by the end of the year. Microsoft previously bought a $240 million stake in Facebook at a whopping $15 billion valuation, in exchange for global advertising rights.
This deal parallels the search deal that Google signed with MySpace in 2006, when it won the rights to provide search and advertising to the News Corp-owned social network. Thus far the deal has failed to produce any real results for Google as they have struggled to monetise the worlds largest social network, but it blames the under performance on the difficulty with monetizing social networks in general.
In May this year Microsoft launched what at the time seemed an apparently desperate move to actually pay users for using Live Search with a Cash back program. That initiative has, however, proven to be a success, increasing search usage by 15 per cent. But Live search still trails Google and Yahoo by huge margins, accounting for only 9 per cent of all search queries (Yahoo and Google account for 21 per cent and 62 per cent respectively).
- STARTUP
