Tech giant Microsoft should consider the prospect of selling Bing to Facebook if it really wishes to compete with Google in the search market.
That’s the opinion of Rick Sherlund, an analyst at Nomura Equity Research, who suggests that a price tag of around $5 billion would be a sum sweet enough to tempt Facebook, allowing it to compete with the current search engine leader.
“If their real motivation for being in the search business is to prevent Google from having complete market dominance, Microsoft would be better off working with Facebook,” claimed Sherlund in an interview on Bloomberg Radio’s “Bloomberg Surveillance”, cited by business-standard.com.
Furthermore, the expert suggests that as Microsoft has “clearly lost” the battle for the search market, it should reach out to Facebook, who “needs to be” in the search business, reports mediamughals.com.
If the deal goes through, Microsoft may be able to boost earnings by six to eight per cent, whilst getting back about 80 per cent of monetised search traffic with none of the associated costs. It would also turn the SEO world upside down due to Facebook’s popularity and overwhelming user base.
“Facebook needs to be in the search business,” he said. “It’s an enormous monetisation opportunity for them.”
As Microsoft already has a two per cent stake in Facebook, coming to an agreement may be easier than people think, concludes Sherlund.
