Search is where it’s at on Facebook. Moving even further away from display ads, Microsoft has announced it will no longer be selling them on the Facebook site at all. The move was accompanied by the announcement that Microsoft will also be using Bing as the default for web search on Facebook on a global scale, pushing beyond the current U.S. restrictions outlined by their existing partnership.

Microsoft has said in a blog post that the decision to stop selling display ads on Facebook was a mutual decision, and that Microsoft would like to focus on the aspects of Facebook advertising that make sense. As Microsoft has already shared its plans to expand its current Bing offering on Facebook, it appars as though search may have a lot to do with the monetization of Facebook and related advertising options.

Right now Microsoft Bing is still rolling out new features on a regular basis, seeking additional adoption from web users and mobile users alike. Upon launch, Bing was already rather inclusive as far as features go, with a multimedia approach to search that also leveraged the social web more directly than Google. Incorporating Twitter and Facebook into their long term search plans indicates Microsoft’s hopes around the social web as they pertain to its own investment in Facebook.

Bing’s search results on Facebook, however, are pretty dismal. Going along with Facebook’s simple format for displaying information, it’s difficult to even tell that it’s a Bing search. Unlike the vibrancy of Bing’s main search portal, Bing results on Facebook are merely a series of links. That’s archaic compared to most search engine’s increasing ability to better contextualize search data. This is particularly notable as far as Bing is concerned, as its move towards contextual search results is one way in which Microsoft could be looking to out-do Google.

This process of contextualizing search data has been an ideal attached to the potential of social networking platforms, with Facebook leading the race. As Facebook continues to open up its platform towards more default public sharing, Microsoft’s Bing is leveraging that publicly-shared information to provide more relative search results in some cases. Tying search into more aspects of our actual Facebook experience can be another way in which an improved Bing presence on the social network could be used to Microsoft’s advantage.

The old tactic of becoming a default tool across as many partnering services as possible is one that Microsoft is now able to better employ on web-related platforms, particularly Facebook. With the social network claiming over 375 million users now, accessing those users on such a large scale could be a major benefit for Microsoft Bing.

By Julie Blaustein

If you haven’t been to a Lunch 2.0 you should make it a point to schedule the time around lunch to attend one. After all, everyone needs to eat lunch. At Lunch 2.0 you not only score a free lunch but you will also meet new companies, smart people, eager recruiters and maybe even go home with some bling. Lunch 2.0 was started about 2 years ago when folks would sneak into other folks’ corporate cafeterias to eat lunch. Today the lunches are eagerly hosted not only in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Seattle but now in Europe and Asia. Great press has been written about Lunch 2.0′s including from the SF Chronicle and the WSJ. The recent Lunch 2.0 held at the Powerset’s office in San Francisco was held for Bing. Bing was in town to celebrate its six-months since the launch and the recent partnership with Twitter.

It was a full-capacity crowd at Bing. Keep in mind, one can not just sign up on Facebook, one must provide full disclosure of who it is that will be coming for lunch on UpComing to be truly rsvp’d. Sadly, Lunch 2.0 hopefuls were turned away for the Bing Lunch 2.0 at the Powerset front desk if they were not on the list. If you were lucky enough to gain admittance, get past the front desk and up the elevator, you found yourself served a gourmet lunch, beverages including beer, along with desert. Bing goodies were also served including a Bing hat just in time for the winter chill. All types showed up from the web 2.0 world. A few of the players that I ran into included recruiter Robert Greene of GreeneSearch who places whiz kid engineers into the hottest start ups, Jamie Perlman who does Business Development for SlideShare and is known for his ability to “sweet talk” anyone into any deal, Salesperson Michael Hansen of ZenDesk, the latest darling of the start up world and CEO Marc Cramer of SurfCanyon whose technology is integrated into Bing!

To join the list and get alerts for the next Lunch 2.0, go to their website, Facebook Page or their LinkedIn Group. If your company wants to host, you might want to first read How to Host a Lunch 2.0 and if you can handle it, then contact the organizers at their Lunch 2.0 site.

Bing Greeters Giving Out Bling

From PR 2.0

Over the years, Twitter search was plagued by an unbelievable flaw. Deleted tweets remained in Twitter’s search index and thus, would appear in the search results regardless of the conscious act of manually removing the tweets from your personal stream. Believe it or not, this problem remained constant much to the dismay of many power users. To my pleasant surprise, Twitter has finally rectified this problem and has officially removed deleted tweets from its index.

Now that Google and Bing are channeling Twitter search results, it’s widely suspected that Twitter had no choice but to remedy this enduring problem. Imagine if your deleted tweets ranked among the top results in Google or Bing? Obviously privacy is a primary concern and this is a step in the right direction. However, privacy on the social Web is an oxymoron of sorts. Once a Tweet is published for example, it is indexed by many other third-party services, networks and applications. And, even if you delete a Tweet, it still may reside somewhere else. For example, if you stream your Tweets to Facebook and Tumblr, obviously you’d have to delete the updates across multiple platforms. But, the other challenge is that there are several other services that pull tweets where they may also reside once deleted.

Either way, to officially have deleted tweets removed from search results is a welcome update that is way overdue, but valued nonetheless.

Oh, and make sure to check out Collecta for real-time search results…it not only indexes the live twitter feed, but also the social web to reveal activity around keywords as they appear online. (Note: I’m a tech adviser to the team.)

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