Many people feel that Facebook has the best shot of any company out there to compete with Google on a search level, but it is still highly unlikely. One thing Facebook will offer is a new search that google can not.
When Facebook fully implements search into their site you more than likely will get search results based on what the people within your network like, are interested in, or recommend. Friends and familiies recommendations of products is probably the top thing that drives consumers to use one company over another. Currently facebook has you networked to all your friends and family. Each person within your network follows or likes businesses and also can choose businesses they are interested in. Given this, Facebook has everything it needs to put together a good search.
One major upside I see them gaining from implementing the search is that a lot of these categories such as interests are based on a facebook page. This would force everyone that is going to rank in facebooks searches to have a business page, which would drive facebooks traffic up and members up even higher. Right now Facebook has just implemented Bings search into their searches so you do not have to be on facebook to come up in their searches, but it does help because they show their facebook businesses first.
One major problem I see is that there are so many people out there that have huge networks that consist of a lot of people they barely know or do not know at all. When you search would you really care about the input from those people? If not, how is that weeded out?
What do you think about the future of Facebook search?
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I have a hard time believing anyone will ever be serious competition to google on a purely search basis.
I think its a case of Facebook trying to do something they really have no skill at. How long has Microsoft being trying to get a search engine that could compete with Google off the ground? I heard Bing grew this year but less than google. Where does that leave them? Its wonderful you will see all of this input but I predict egg on their face. Most companies have great difficulty cross pollinating their success in other areas.
I agree that until someone comes up with something completely off the wall different, no one will compete with google.
Marc, I think facebook will have a little more success that what you believe. They are already implementing it in a way and it seems to work. If you search a business on facebook it will first give you businesses that you or your friends like and then you can click “See More” to see other ones. It currently is not near as thorough of a search. They need almost every business to be on there, which I think for them to do that google will have to give a lot of weight to facebook pages, which I do not think they will do if facebook is getting more powerful.
I think one solution here for facebook delivering relevant results is to make is to allow lists of people to be ranked in terms of how close they are to you. The other solution is to rank peoples influence on you by the amount of interaction they have with you. Also it could be that they could compare interests and compare similar things liked to also sugest things they might like. This type of analysis could be done even for people who are not friends but like the same one or two or three things. Amazon does this aplenty with great success. Such sugestions would be a great augment for facebooks PPC offerings as well.