Soon after Bing launched worldwide in June 2009, Microsoft started indexing select Twitter feeds, mainly very popular ones. In October 2009, at the Web 2.0 Summit, the software giant announced a deal with the small company, and Bing started serving up Twitter search results in real-time.
Furthermore, Microsoft, which by the way is a major investor in Facebook, also announced a global partnership with the social networking giant that would start by bringing Facebook status updates to Bing search results, but didn’t reveal when it was coming. At the time, I wrote it made sense to start with Twitter because “Facebook has a significantly larger user base with many more status updates, and it’s much easier to start small for something as new as real-time search.”
Both the Twitter and Facebook deals were nonexclusive. In fact, Google announced a deal with Twitter the next day. Facebook was very noticeably missing, as the two Internet giants never managed to work something out.
Ever since then, strictly on the social front, Microsoft has been working hard with Facebook and Twitter while Google has been failing with both. Microsoft focused on working to bring social from the outside in and Google focused on brining social from the inside out.
In 2011, Microsoft further expanded Bing’s various Facebook features. Facebook even tapped Bing for Page content translation. Last but certainly not least, Microsoft renewed its real-time Twitter deal.
Now let’s take a look at Google. The search giant never convinced Facebook to come onboard. When its own Twitter deal was set to expire, Google launched Google+ in July 2011. Since this was a clear Facebook and Twitter competitor, negotiations for a renewal fell apart. Google claims Twitter walked away, while Twitter has not publicly given a reason as to why the deal was not renewed.
Fast-forward to this week. Google announces Search plus Your World (SPYW), which favors Google+ results over Facebook and Twitter. Twitter publicly criticizes SPYW, and the company even releases an official statement. Facebook employees react as well, but the company declines to comment. Google meanwhile says it would have been more than happy to treat Facebook and Twitter equally to Google+, but the companies aren’t giving the search giant access to the data it needs.
So, how come Facebook and Google never managed to reach a deal.
From a source with knowledge of the Facebook/Google negotiations over integration of Facebook’s data into Google’s search index. This source – who while very credible does come from Facebook’s side of the debate – explained to me that during the 2009 negotiations, Google balked at Facebook’s request that Facebook data be protected in the same fashion as it is in Facebook’s deal with Bing. In essence, Google claimed no way to keep data within circles of friends in the context of a Google search.
According to this source: “Senior executives at Google insisted that for technical reasons all information would need to be public and available to all.” But the source goes on to point out that in Google’s own integration of Google+, Google does exactly what it claims it could not do with Facebook data. “The only reason Facebook has a Bing integration and not a Google integration is that Bing agreed to terms for protecting user privacy that Google would not,” this source told me.
Also, and quite interestingly, Google also refused to agree to a clause which stated that Google could not use the data to build its own social network. Now, this is where things can get very dicey. It’s very hard to prove whether or not a company is using the data in particular ways, and had Google agreed to that clause, it might have severely limited its ability to build Google+. What is clear is that Microsoft agreed to Facebook’s terms.
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