Lu's presentation might lead you to believe this was mostly about Bing continuing to nibble away at Google's seemingly unshakeable 60%-plus share of the U.S. search market.
Lu, whom Microsoft lured from a senior post at Yahoo, vowed that Bing integrated into Facebook would " harness and unlock the tremendous potentials of social."
However, this partnership isn't really about Bing vs. Google. It's much more about Facebook hunkering down to repel the ambitious search giant.
Gartner tech industry analyst Ray Valdes points out that Facebook's engineering team was in lockdown mode from mid-August until last week, when the team emerged to unveil an updated Facebook Groups and several other improvements.
This skunkworks output and the Bing partnership stem directly from Facebook CEO's Mark Zuckerberg's concern about Google's relentless and continuing attempts to muscle its way into the social Web, says Valdes, who has recently spoken with Zuckerberg about this.
Lucky for Zuck, Google thus far has stumbled. It's acquisitions of microblogging site Jaiku and mobile social network Dodgeball have gone nowhere. Its ambitious, would-be Facebook-killer initiatives Google Wave and Google Buzz both fizzled -- Buzz spectacularly so. Last month, Google quietly agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle a privacy lawsuit stemming from the February launch of Buzz, the massive social network Google created overnight by automatically including Gmail users' private contacts on public Buzz profiles.
But Google is nothing if not relentless. Its resolve to get a toe hold on Facebook's turf became evident three months ago when Paul Adams, a senior user-experience designer, posted this extensive presentation, which got 300,000 page views on slideshare.net. Adams outlined what he characterized as a glaring weakness in Facebook's architecture: the inability for members to easily create multiple independent groups of friends. The implication: Google is developing a secret project that will exploit this weakness, says Valdes.
Shortly after Adams posted his slides, Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to work seven days a week in the skunkworks, says Valdes. The improvements Facebook announced last week -- and the new Bing partnership -- directly result from the gauntlet thrown down by Adams. Facebook's recent moves should be viewed as pre-emptive strikes to impede the Google juggernaut, he says.
"Facebook's no. 1 threat right now is Google," says Valdes. "So Facebook is trying to align its forces with others, in this case Microsoft, who are also trying to compete against Google."
Google has not been deterred. The search giant has recently "hired a bunch of people, repositioned management and continues to view the social Web as strategically important," says Valdes. "Rumor has it Google will roll out a major new social Web initiative over the next few weeks or months."
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