Microsoft has announced that it stroke a new partnership with Facebook that will allow the software giant to add a toolbar with search capabilities on Facebook pages. This will allow the Redmond-based company to place contextual ads similar to the ones Google provides which will be seen by the people that have a Facebook account every time they will use the search feature that will be added on the site.

The new deal is supposed to help Microsoft reach its target of increasing its presence on the search related advertising market, a market that is strongly dominated by Google. By bringing the search feature to the social network site, the company will potentially benefit of the community that has been created around Facebook, which includes 29 members in the United States alone.

According to statistics provided by comScore, over 60 percent of the people that searched the Internet last year used Google, followed by about 20 percent that used Yahoo and only 9 percent  to rely on Microsoft. The Internet search ad market is one of the fastest growing markets globally and it has been estimated that if the current trend is preserved, Google's revenues will become greater than Microsoft's in the near future.

Even if the new Live Search toolbar that Microsoft will embed in Facebook will become a popular feature, it is still uncertain whether it will generate the revenue Microsoft hopes for. Google tried the same thing early on by striking a similar partnership with MySpace, but things didn't went as well as the search giant thought.