This fall, Facebook will integrate Microsoft’s Live Search with their social network, giving Microsoft the ultimate return on their $240 million investment. Along with Live Search will come Microsoft’s search advertising. Things were already looking up for Live Search, and now they’re looking even better.

Live Search had a big month in May, getting 15% more visitors than the previous month, and they have also inked a deal with Hewlett-Packard to get the Live Search toolbar installed on HP PC’s.

MySpace has a similar search and ad deal with Google, but so far, things aren’t exactly going to plan. Lackluster results have led to finger pointing from both sides, notably with MySpace accusing Google of doing a poor job with their ad service. Searches just aren’t utilized through social networks very much. People are accustomed to using the search bar in their browsers by now.

But Microsoft and Facebook seem to recognize this. Steve Ballmer today announced an API that he hopes will provide a “rich search experience for the Facebook users.” If Facebook can do something interesting with search (Adam Ostrow at Mashable suggests leveraging your friends list), then it might be a little more lucrative than merely having regular old search.

There’s talk out there right now that Mark Zuckerberg should sell high and offload Facebook to Microsoft and retire a young billionaire. I know that’s what I’d do: take the money, become an even younger version of Mark Cuban, and get a yacht with plenty of models from Brazil and the Czech Republic. Microsoft would get a young, loyal user base plus a boatload of data to mine.

This announcement comes after Zuckerberg spoke at the Facebook Developer Conference and announced, among other things, Facebook Connect, which will allow users to take their profiles across the web. Zuckerberg announced 24 partners for the program, including Digg and Movable Type.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 11:37 amand is filed under Search Engine Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.