By Stewart Tongue

YNOT – It’s no secret that Google has dominated the global search market almost from the moment of its launch. Recent U.S. Federal Trade Commission decisions not to pursue monopoly charges against the search goliath handed the company a major coup by tacitly approving the much-maligned habit of co-opting content from listed sites and providing Google even more ability to stay ahead in the race for advertising dollars.

Google may have miscalculated its own weight, however, when it created Google+ as a challenge to social-media heavyweight Facebook. In response, Facebook and Bing — the Google search competitor owned by Microsoft — have banded together in an attempt to cut their common enemy off at the knees by developing new ways to leverage search and social media in combination.

The deal gives Bing access to the largest collection of social data in the world — much larger than what Google+ has been able to gather from an exponentially smaller user base. In addition, Bing benefits from data mining at a slew of websites that integrate with Facebook’s sharing tool. The embarrassing wealth of data may give Bing a formidable advantage as it seeks to catch, and hopefully surpass, Google’s market dominance.

What does Facebook get from the deal? The social-media behemoth’s new Graph Search function is powered by Bing technology. Graph Search allegedly will help Facebook users find better results, because the results will be based a variety of social cues, including Facebook likes. The theory behind Graph Search is that recommendations of friends and friends of friends count when online searchers make decisions about products, places and people.

Reportedly, Bing plans to use Facebook’s social interactions data to massage and refine its search algorithm in ways Google simply can’t because Google doesn’t possess the same kind of data. Bing and Facebook are betting social recommendations will increase results relevance, giving end-users a more positive search experience.