The Balance of Power is Shifting from Google to Facebook

Today's deal between Facebook and Microsoft, which allows Microsoft's Bing search engine to incorporate your Facebook "like" data into its relevance rankings, illustrates how the balance of power on the Internet is shifting from search to social networking.

Microsoft got interested in search in 2003 for a lot of reasons, not least because it saw how Google was shaping the behavior of Internet users.

In user testing and from various data collection systems like the MSN toolbar, Microsoft noticed that a lot of users started each Web surfing session by entering a search term into Google, and returned to the site throughout the day. Google's blank white page was becoming the de facto start page for the Internet.