• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 9, 2015

I'm not sure you can call it a friendship. I have a special place in my heart for the word "friend." There are friends and there are acquaintances. As I told my friend aimClear Founder Marty Weintraub in an email this morning, I have lots of acquaintances, but few I would call "friends." So for the sake of this opinion piece, I'll call Microsoft's agreement with Google a "relationship," far removed from best friends forever.

In case you missed the news, Microsoft has announced that Bing Shopping ads are now integrated into Google DoubleClick. The relationship aims to help marketers using both Bing and Microsoft platforms. Finally. 

"Due to the growing importance of Bing to advertisers in reaching their business goals, Microsoft and Google DS have been working more closely together to offer Bing Ads, including Shopping Campaigns in DoubleClick Search (DS) Commerce Suite," a Microsoft Bing spokesperson told SearchBlog.

One topic that the Bing team declined to address is who owns the data. The topic was glossed over in a heartbeat, and the companies are certainly not friends enough to share the data.

The Google-Bing deal will not dramatically change the paid-search advertising landscape, but rather is a good example of how platforms need to work together for the good of advertisers and their agency partners. 

Facebook remains one platform that has not quite gotten the message. CEO Mark Zuckerberg most recently told analysts during an earnings call that Facebook sees more than 1.5 billion searches on its platform daily. It touts searches on what friends do, the movies they see, the photos they share. Everyone's a friend. 

Dear Zuck -- perhaps you need to practice what you preach and work more closely with Google and Bing to provide advertisers options. If that's the case why doesn't Facebook befriend Bing and Google more than it already has?

Brands increasingly see success on Facebook. It turns out that Marriott uses "DPA to re-target travelers based on their travel search habits and they are now scaling globally across their portfolio of brands, Zuckerberg explained during the earnings call. "LatAm e-commerce company, MercadoLibre, uses DPA to re-market over 38 million products in over 13 countries. Both are seeing high ROI and continuing to invest."

RBC Capital Markets Analyst Mark Mahaney asked whether Facebook is seeing greater attempts by site users to search on the site and how that could change during the next three to five years.