The boys and girls at HungryGoWhere have been getting busy lately. Other than their usual restaurant hopping sessions, they have been busy ensuring that the site brings value to food lovers all around and the business remains a sustainable and long term one. And they have seemed to found the sweet spot with their newly announced partnership with Microsoft.

HungryGoWhere, the one stop portal for foodies in Singapore announced their partnership with Microsoft today. HungryGoWhere is now the de-facto food review site for MSN Singapore users and can be accessed from MSN’s home page. According to Microsoft’s official press release, “HungryGoWhere.com will assist us in providing greater and more relevant content to the 1.3 million MSN users in Singapore. In addition, regular visitors to HungryGoWhere.com will now have access to MSN’s leading Sports and Entertainment channels, as well as the new Lifestyle channel all with one click of their mouse.”

Going by the looks of the revamped HungryGoWhere site, most of their users were concerned about independence of the restaurant reviews posted by external reviewers . But the HGW guys made it clear in their press release, that they remain an independent entity and will continue to be a free resource to its users. They also mentioned that, with this strategic partnership with Microsoft, it will enable them to improve their technology functionalities and offerings to their users, something that they have always wanted to do.

From Microsoft’s perspective, they are partnering with local market-leading websites to “enhance their overall offering to users”. They have partnered previously with Singapore-based Wego to power their travel search. This is definitely a step forward for our startup industry here. By partnering with a big giant like Microsoft, HungryGoWhere is able to leverage on MSN Singapore’s high traffic and tap on their brand credibility, something that will definitely aid their advertising tie ups with restaurants. I’m speculating here but I believe that Hungry Go Where may be able to up-sell some of their advertising to MSN, proving a lot more value to their current set of users. The same probably goes for MSN’s base of food advertisers.

With such tie-ups it does seem like Microsoft is trying to push Bing as one of the leading search engines for popular sites. According to Microsoft, 45% of all Bing users come from the MSN portal and with this partnership, it looks like they are planning on making Bing the leading search provider for food related queries at least in Singapore.

While we have heard that HungryGoWhere users have been complaining about the site’s redesign (the designer is the same designer as GoThere.sg and apparently, they have a link to the classic version of the design to pacify complaints), we feel that this partnership makes perfect sense for HungryGoWhere and Microsoft and their users will slowly start to embrace the positive aspects of the redesign and the partnership. We wish to congratulate the HungryGoWhere team on this amazing feat! Kudos to Microsoft for giving such opportunities to Singapore startups!

Note: This post is co-written by Sneha Menon and myself