After declaring Facebook’s search war with Google yesterday, many Google fans were quick to point out the lack of a basis for such a claim. Part of their argument is accurate, Greg Sterling argues that, “In general the search user experience on Facebook is ambiguous and cluttered.” That may be correct (although subjective) but just because Facebook doesn’t function like a search behemoth today doesn’t mean it will never be one.
Right now there are plenty of unanswered questions. One of the most important is: do Facebook users use the site as a search engine? While users most definitely search for other people, they don’t use Facebook as a tool to search for the answers to their questions. Becoming a search engine that competes with Google will require a change of user behavior.
This is a challenging task but not impossible, and considering that Facebook has demonstrated a willingness to change their product and user behavior in the past, it shouldn’t be surprising for that to happen again. Additionally, I should point out that the sensational post title used yesterday was simply used as a tool for gaining traction. Unfortunately our attempt to do so earlier this week failed, as it had a less dramatic title of, “Facebook Tests Show SEO May Be Possible With Open Graph“.
In the grand scheme of things, Facebook has a long way to go in search. However to ignore the company’s latest actions to push out the Open Graph as the basis of their search strategy would be foolish. Facebook is rapidly moving toward becoming the largest internet site in the world. Google didn’t attempt to buy the company years back for no reason. Google also isn’t pushing out new social and semantic features for no reason at all.
Facebook will be a significant threat to Google and while Google may still be the leader in search, Facebook will rapidly gain traction.
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Facebook Seo is going to be wack if it relies simply on a like to rank. They'll be flooded with fake accounts that will like stuff to get it ranked…. Google has been doing search for years. Do you think that they're really going to be competitors, or do they have the ability to work together to create this new way of searching? Who knows… We'll see.
Comment by Michael Knorr — June 25, 2010 @ 9:34 am
I think creating fake accounts to flood "likes" is far more difficult than purchasing inbound links and submitting spammy articles all over internet, to build Google SEO.
I strongly believe, using "like count" to rank search results will perfectly work with some categories. Specially when it comes to consumption related searches, people will more rely on recommendations by other people, rather than recommendation by a SE crawler.
Cheers,
Amisampath.com
Comment by Facebook User — June 25, 2010 @ 10:53 am
Facebook will compete – not only will they have all the OG data, but they'll also have the like data. Combine that with how close FB is with Microsoft (Bing), and suddenly that's a ton of great data in the hands of people who know something about search. To be clear, this is not going to happen next month, but maybe in a year or two after OG solidifies a bit, FB aggregates a lot of data, and after Facebook has time to work with Bing to build a really solid index. The "search" we're talking about may end up even being Bing rather than on FB itself.
Comment by Joel Downs — June 25, 2010 @ 1:13 pm
@Joel – you nailed it IMHO.
People are talking as if FB can take on Google right now. The simple answer is they can't. But they've got plenty of time to prepare the background work whilst they reign in all the data. And they will reign in the data. Facebook being the brand that it is will just naturally cause people to want their sites to be indexed by FB – especially in the early stages (I know I would). The key is not in the Meta data alone (as can be crawled by any bot) nor the no. of likes alone but all the data combined. They've also got all the demographics of the users who've 'liked' objects which is something that isn't accessible, as far as I'm aware, by other bots? (I'm thinking most people reading this thread already understand what I've just said – thought I'd say it anyway!)
I'm a bit of a Google fan boy (if I'm honest) and I never thought anyone could seriously challenge Google but these recent developments really are big news for all involved. I think I might become a bit of a Facebook fanboy
Comment by Philip Turpin — June 26, 2010 @ 2:23 pm
hello , apakah saya diperkenankan menuliskan komentar saya yang tak seberapa ini disini ?
Comment by bed bath and beyond — January 1, 2012 @ 5:56 pm
Personally, I don't know what Google is good for other than…. Yes, I use the search engine which is great but all their other products like gmail etc are so archaic in its interface and its user friendliness. Google has money but no class. Facebook on the other hand is also heading for trouble. While Google at least has the search engine which adds to the usefulness of the web, Facebook adds no value and entirely thrives on users giving up on their privacy. I don't know what all the experts are talking about, but Facebook will be heading into a big problem at this rate. People are getting really bored and tired of these social networking websites. Yes.. I can see the graphs etc and it all looks great but a few years from now, it would look very different. Sorry for being so abrupt..
Comment by what is acid reflux — January 8, 2012 @ 12:14 am