Now that the Microsoft play for Yahoo appears to be over (appears to be), everyone and their grandparents are speculating about what Microsoft and Yahoo are going to do now. One quick thing that Microsoft could do to increase its potential reach in search is encourage Facebook to put a Live Search box on the site.

I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already. MySpace and the AOL-owned Bebo both have web search boxes (from Google and Yahoo, respectively) on their sites, but Facebook still doesn’t.

Microsoft made a $240 million strategic investment in Facebook and is providing display ads to the site. Adding a Live Search box (and related search ads) would boost not only the utility of the Facebook site but monetization as well. It would also give Microsoft a “back door” way to expose millions of users to Live Search.

Traffic measurement firm comScore says that Facebook has roughly 36 million monthly users in the US. The site itself claims “more than 70 million active users” overall.

Makes sense, no?

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Facebook | Microsoft: Bing

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

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