Social media giant Facebook has put an end to its two-year partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine as the provider for web search results on the social network. For the short term, Facebook is limiting search results to show content from within the network. According to reports, this is to enable Facebook to focus on enhancing its user experience, though the search and social media watchers continue to speculate that Facebook is working on its own search engine to rival that of the market leader Google.

Intuitively, the decision makes a lot of sense as few people (anecdotally) seem to go to Facebook and perform searches expecting to see anything other than people’s profiles or company pages. However, considering the enormous captive user base of Facebook, a powerful web search capability might seem to offer its own opportunities.

While Facebook has maintained that it will continue its partnership with Microsoft in various other areas, we suspect the removal of Bing search from Facebook will be a greater loss for Bing than it is for Facebook.

There has been some recent ‘flux’ in the search space and realignment of existing relationships after Mozilla had announced in November that it had entered into a 5-year relationship with Yahoo to be the default search  engine on the Firefox browser (default search engines in Russia and China will be Yandex and Baidu, respectively).