In a recent post on the Bing Search blog, it appears that the search relationship between Microsoft and Facebook is expanding.

Microsoft secured the Facebook search deal back in July 2008. Under the terms of the agreement, Facebook integrated Live Search (which was Bing’s brand back then) web and sponsored listings into the site, providing users with a way of searching the web without leaving.

Under the newly expanded relationship – 3 key areas have changed.

• Expanding Search to Include Richer Results

Facebook will now allow Bing to include richer more comprehensive search listings. It’ll move beyond just link based results to provide richer answers and improve the speed of the searching experience.

• Expansion beyond the US

Up til now, Bing has only secured search on the US version of facebook. This will now move globally, opening Bings results up to a much wider audience.

• Facebook Takes Over Display Advertising

Where Bing has taken responsibility for selling Facebook display advertising to date, under the new conditions, Facebook will take over ad sales and leave sponsored search to Bing/Microsoft.

Jon Tinter, the General Manager of Bing had this to say via the release post:

This is an exciting time for us as we continue to work with Facebook on great new experiences for customers. As you know, Bing has been very focused on helping customers make important decisions. We believe that counsel from family and friends can be a big part of that process. Going deeper in web search experiences with Facebook, in addition to the collaboration we announced last October about bringing public data from Facebook’s API into the search experience, will enable us to do great things together for our customers.

The expansion deal is great for Bing in terms of growing the audience for its web and sponsored search results.

I’m not entirely sure that web search from Facebook is enough to peg back Google’s dominance, but it definitely offers Bing advertisers some unique exposure opportunities.