 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (AFP PHOTO/Kimihiro Hoshino)
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Facebook chose Microsoft rather than Google as its search partner to ensure that when a Facebook post or picture is deleted, it also disappears from the Internet.
Facebook's new social search engine, Graph Search -- and its potential to put everything from LinkedIn to every online dating site out of business -- has been making headlines, but one piece of information that Mark Zuckerberg divulged during his company's press event this week seems to have gone more or less unnoticed.
As first reported in The Guardian, during the launch event, the social media CEO was asked why Facebook had chosen to partner with Microsoft, rather than Google, to create and launch the new feature, and he explained that it was simply a question of privacy.
Despite a slew of negative publicity in recent months regarding Facebook's and Instagram's privacy policy changes (estimated to have cost the image-sharing social media site almost half of its regular users), Zuckerberg explained that Google was less willing to change its search algorithm so that once something was deleted on Facebook or once a page setting had been changed from public to private, it also disappeared from search results and therefore the internet.
Microsoft was willing to make this change and that is why the two companies have been in partnership since 2010.
"I think the main thing is about when people share something on Facebook, we want to give them not only the ability to broadcast something out but also change their privacy settings later and take the content down. That requires incredibly quick updating ... We need that content to be gone immediately ... You need infrastructure that can support that and that takes a lot of commitment from the partner. Microsoft was more willing to do things that were specific to Facebook," said Zuckerberg of the decision. 
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