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More or  less than a year ago, Microsoft invested $250 million in Facebook.  Until today there has not been any clear and present evidence of that investment except their announcements about it.

Anyway, it's been a long time coming for Microsoft and Facebook to come up with a collaboration that will benefit both their companies by utilizing each other.  Yesterday, the first love child of Microsoft and Facebook was born.  Microsoft Live Search is now available on Facebook.

"By integrating web search into Facebook, you can increase the information available to share with your friends, family and coworkers on the site. For example, your friend may invite you to an event at a new restaurant. Without leaving Facebook, you can check out the details of the restaurant on the web. Or, say you see photos in your News Feed about a friend's recent trip to Dubai. Inspired, you can search the web for more information about travel without having to leave Facebook. Along with your search results, you may also begin to see ads for products, services or other things that are relevant to your query."

Searching the web in a social network is not new nor is it anything too lucrative.  Google has a similar deal with MySpace and Friendster.  Nonetheless, Live Search has been struggling to gain a foothold in the search market and Microsoft has been pouring lots of cash to even to the point of paying users to search.  This move with Facebook might help in Microsoft's struggle to make Live search a viable and competitive competitor to Google.

It's a good effort on Microsoft's side.  After putting in semantic search into their Live Search engine, nothing else seems to be working against the Google juggernaut.  So they might be making the right decision of integrating Live Search in social networks where they have stakes in.  In the meantime, Microsoft must find a better way to better increase the distribution of Live Search to users, Windows is the first step, Windows is always the first step. 

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