When does a big wide ‘Search for what you are looking for’ appear on Facebook?
So, let’s take this real case:
I attended GDC 2011 (San Fran) and was obviously not able to attend all the panels and discussions.
Now, sitting on my table, I typed ‘GDC 2011 Updates and notes’ on the Search bars on Google and Facebook respectively.
See what Google shows me:
It’s anonymous, factual and is based in click by click discovery – I will keep clicking on links till I find what I was looking for.
Now see what the same search shows up on Facebook (I think by far the ugliest piece I have even seen on a Facebook page so far):
WHAT CAN AND WILL HAPPEN:
When Facebook integrates ‘SEARCH’ that spiders ALL WALL POSTS across all its 600+ mn users and then shows it to me in organized manner:
First, the posts of my friends – so these are posts that are organized by way of the subject.
Next, posts of friends of my friends – so that I can read them and also make these Friends of Friends my friends.
Lastly, posts of other people on Facebook relating to the search query I had.
Now, think of the Google result again…
A) The anonymity of whose links I am visiting will be killed… I would rather read a post of someone I know that any random person (even if it’s TechCrunch)
B) The posts will be via REAL persons whom I can identify and hence follow up with (I mean real humans write what we find on Google right? But I can’t connect with these people other than ‘commenting’ below their write ups…)
C) I can make real friends with people who have similar interests in topics that I am involved in.
D) Advertising near and around that page will be more effective than Google CPC!!
E) Here comes the killer – SEO would essentially be redundant, ‘coz who would post JUNK on their own walls (and the Facebook search algorithm would obviously check how many friends do people have to rank the search results)… so all those crappy sites stuffed with SEO garbage would be a thing of the past!
Considering this, don’t you think SEARCH will make Facebook the REAL GOOGLE KILLER?!!
*******
Saurabh Gupta
Indeed this sounds interesting, and anyways seems viable too with 600 million user base, but dont you think it would be too mean and would certainly doom Facebook in every manner.
Today we all know that facebook and twitter killed Rss Readers in entirety, with the emergence of Facebook fan pages and rise of tweets rss readers which were effectively distributing news across channels is almost dead,
All the major publications boast about the Twitter handles and Facebook Fan pages, people like or follow them to recieve the relevant news that they want, now the question is if tomorrow Facebook applies this social search phenomenon then it would not kill Google but Facebook.
1. I really dont want my wall posts to be scanned and available as search results, as they are personal too.
2. Facebook would again do some notorious act with the privacy policy to apply this.
3. Google earns on a “Mutualization” revenue model, where all the content creators gets benefited by the traffic
they receive from Search engines. and thus keep them motivated.
4. Its getting Vicious. Day after Day Mark Zuckerberg appears to me as some B Grade Bollywood Director who just love to steal and replicate ideas. 1st he replicated Friendster and Myspace (Entire Network), then Twitter (open public profiles), then Groupon (Facebook Deals), Then Foursquare (Facebook Places), then Gmail
( Facebook mail)…. Wow, Is there some slump or scarcity happening in the dot com industry, i am not seeing any new concept taking birth.
be prepared for the next bubble bust and believe me its just around the corner.
Daisy Smo
Hi Saurabh,
But dont you think this is a better solution to search. Most of the geeks all over the world may spend more than 50% of their valuable time on the Facebook and the other half to Google and other surfing. Searching through Facebook shall be entertained by people more than Google if the search results continue to be so proper and as per user…. Whereas talking about the Security part, Facebook does have to make certain changes for the same and avoid leaks through People profiles.
Saurabh Gupta
Thought Provoking…
For me its like Resident Evil in the making. I loved one statement mentioned by someone which read “Facebook Knows your DNA” the statement it self is destructive, tomorrow they ll know your SSN too. I dnt know exactly how it would impact. hoping for the best.
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
Just added:
E) Here comes the killer – SEO would essentially be redundant, coz who would post JUNK on their own walls (and the facebook search algorithm would obviously check how many friends do people have to rank the search results)…so all those crappy sites stuffed with SEO garbage would be a thing of the past!
Sourav
We can see that fb is continuously becoming more and more dominant on www. Apart from the areas that fb has already ventured into, as mentioned by Saurabh, fb can be real devastating for other web portals when it steps into e-commerce space. Like what they did to online gaming by making it social, the same can happen to e-commerce. People will always like to buy something that friends in their network have suggested, rather than buying something random from some random website.
However, fb can go about it more passively. This again can be done by implementing the strategy that they have used for games. They can allow third party vendors to sell on facebook platform, while using the intrinsic benefits of fb’s user base and social graph. This will also help in creating wealth by encouraging new entrepreneurs. And the final result will be that we will have a ZYNGA of e-commerce.
-Sourav, wannabe entrepreneur
Printbooth.in
Saurabh Gupta
Hey Sourav,
WOW, thats simply i can say fr the phrase you mentioned : “Zynga of E-commerce” , now thats thought provoking. There are two ways to look at it, either accept the dominance and start swimming with the stream or chose to be a Gladioator…
Aneja Raj
Although I have been a regular reader of these posts, this is my first post on the site. So please bare with me if my comments don’t make sense.
The first thing I noticed on the article (which I am sure you all have) is that the web results on FB appear to have been powered by Bing. The reason I call this out is because the “search” technology that Google, Bing etc have developed is not something that can be easily replicated. Google indexes millions of pages in a fraction of a second. Now that is incredible & a technology feat in itself, comparable to any scientific achievement. So in the first place, I am not even sure if FB can actually develop a good search mechanism it that easily. Twitter is trying to replicate Google’s search model, but have failed miserably so far. I ran an advertising campaign (promoted tweets) on twitter: supplied them with a reasonably sound keyword list, used # tags, expanded my list based on the top performing keywords, tried everything on the SEO rulebook, but still the campaign failed miserably in terms of bringing in any traffic, let alone conversions. Their search engine is just not up to mark. So the point I am trying to put across is FB may have all this user base, but do they have the technology to make this work? May be they do, but something to think about.
Alok mentions a good point on the search results on FB, based on your friends, ranking etc. A lot of ad networks are already using this (not search yet). Media6degress is one of them. They target friends based on your interest. So if you are interested in say “GDC” its likely that the friend in your friends list may be interested too in similar products. They call this look alike targeting or Psychographic targeting. Networks like value click & interclick and audience based targeting companies like Blue kai offer this. My experience so far has been that these don’t work as much as say “search”. When I say that these don’t work, i mean in terms of volume of traffic, & not in terms of the “quality of traffic” they bring in. They had very low click thru rates as well as didn’t move the needle in any of the perception awareness study we did via comscore, etc. We tried CPC deals with FB market place as well, although it brought me lots of traffic at an efficient CPC than search, it didn’t move the needle on the overall brand perception or conversions.
The big question on the article is the logic used to display the results FB vs. G. FB is interested based vs. Google is relevancy & quality based. Relevancy coming in from historical performance, CTRs, landing page load times, content etc. I do believe the later is more suited if you are after quality of traffic vs. amount of traffic. Depends on the objective.
Saurabh brings a excellent point with regards to privacy and peoples wall post being scanned. My guess is that right off the bat, consumers will object to this and will be viewed critically. I really don’t want anyone else to see what I post in my personal space. I can already see people objecting to this in a big way. So if Privacy were to stay in place, the 600 MM users that FB has will become worthless with regards to any search activity. Consider an average user with 100 friends. Any search result just from these 100 friends will be pretty much meaningless. Moreover FB is a gated community while Google is not, a big plus with consumers.
Lastly, I firmly believe that “consumer is the King” in the new world. Search engines like Google use the consumer behavior to rank its search results. The more people click on a link, the more relevant the result is, the more inbound links to your site, the more Google considers it relevant. There is not much impact on bidding price on the quality score or ranking for paid search.
One drawback is that Google relies much of its search results on its history of search. So for a topic like GDC there is probably not enough data as it is fairly new thereby throwing not so accurate results. Same goes with any breaking news stories.
The biggest thing that I like about Google is that they do not set the market price, they let the market set it up for themselves truly giving the control to the user. So far it has been truly consumer focused, reaffirming that the consumer rules.
Just wanted to throw in a diffrent perspective on the above post:) I truly love this forum and the insightful articles written. Keep it coming, I would love to continue to participate when time permits.
Daisy Smo
Well the statement is Really great….. and statement by “Mr. Someone” shall be my status today..!!
Abey John
🙂 search is one part of the online experience. social is another part. social marketing pollution is yet to take off but the signs are already there. If there is a machine serving the results you can bet that there will be a human working overtime to game the results. today there is SEO and they are already talkin SMO … social media optimization… more garbage comin our way.
But of course….SEO rulez dude! just you wait… 😀
SanjoeTom Jose
Interesting insight….One comment though….I prefer the same facility (with much better features though smaller user base) provided by linkedin to look for updates from friends..esp because twitter messaging is integrated..
Sachin Kamaladharan
Wonderful points from everyone. Great stuff from Aneja. Thanks buddy, really a lot of info very nicely explained.
Just to add my perspective, I think it’s going to be difficult for FB to be a Google killer (not impossible). Much like if all content posted on wall posts throws up in search results and if Bing is the background search engine, at the end boils down to the same challenge with the difference of gated searching.
Google is an index of a million pages, both from educational and personal sources. While personal sources of information may be trustworthy to “click” on, however I don’t see them in being qualified. Think a world encyclopaedia fb’ing daily on their wall posts. Don’t think that’s what they would want.
FB may be great in its social networking however their have definite boundaries which is not what Google has. If FB knows your DNA then I would say Google knows more than your mom does.
Ashish Zalani
Very interesting post and comments here, esp the original post from Alok, and comments from Aneja.
To make the discussion even more interesting, I would like to add another dimension here. I think Facebook already has the potential to be a Google Killer, even without any search capabilities at all !!! Here’s why:
When we talk about a “Google Killer”, what do we really mean by it? Google is primarily a search engine, while Facebook is primarily a social networking site. So on the face of it, these are really two very different businesses. But are they really?
If we look at these companies from the perspective of revenues, it turns out that they have one big thing in common — they are both in the advertising business. Despite all the hoopla about SEO, etc, Google doesn’t actually make any money on providing (the non-sponsored) search results. Rather, it makes its money through ad placements. I won’t go into the details of all the different ways that Google makes money on ads, but suffice it to say that a whopping 98% of Google’s $29 Bn in annual revenues comes from ads (this is public information available from its annual reports). As for Facebook, well… its 600 Mn users don’t pay a cent to use it to connect with each other. Nor is it selling anything like Amazon.com, or being a marketplace like eBay. So while there is no publicly available info on where Facebook makes money, the only logical explanation is that it too is making money through advertisements (besides the cash injections from Goldman Sachs and investors). Now let’s look at each company and their business in a bit more detail.
You might wonder, if Google isn’t making money on the search results, why do they care so much about the relevance of the search results to its users? Why all that noise about Page Rank, Relevance, SEO, etc? Well… very simply put, Google is able to lure so many advertisers to place ads with it, because it has a huge installed base of users on the Internet doing searches for all kinds of terms. So, if a game developer is looking for someone who likes to play games, they can sponsor terms like “GDC”, “Games”, etc with Google, knowing that anyone who cares about meaningful content on the Internet is most likely looking for it on Google. For its part, Google needs its search results to be extremely relevant simply in order to retain its user base and keep them coming back to Google (rather than using Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, or anything else for searches). Hence, its focus on search relevance.
Now Facebook… is a social networking site. It doesn’t need search relevance. In fact, it doesn’t need search at all. It just needs lots of users and lots of detailed data about their likes, dislikes, spending habits, etc. Hmmm… what a coincidence. FB does in fact have lots of users (only about 600 Mn of them), AND it has lots of detailed data about their likes and dislikes. In fact, most people on FB happily share this data with FB, thinking that they are sharing it with their friends. And even when users don’t directly indicate their likes and dislikes in their profile, they inadvertently reveal it through their actions on FB — playing games, uploading/sharing photos, what they write in their wall posts, etc. When Saurabh indicated that “FB knows your DNA”, its because they are able to track every action, every wall post of yours to build a detailed profile about who you are, what you like and dislike, etc. This is truly “Advertisers’ Paradise”.
Now the same game developer who was sponsoring various random keywords on Google in the hopes of getting some good hits and conversions no longer has to worry about finding the right audience. He can simply tell Facebook, I want to target my ads to users who are interested in playing games either through demonstrated gaming activity (regularly plays 10~20 hours a week) or through their stated interests (directly mentioned in their profile or through a scan of their wall posts). Preferably in my local area. This allows the advertiser the ability to focus their ads on a very targeted audience, with a significantly higher probability of getting hits and conversions. Thus, even without any search capabilities, just by virtue of having detailed profile data on this huge installed (and growing) user base, FB has a huge advantage over Google, and can lure away its advertisers.
What does this mean to Google? Well… if advertisers switch to advertising with FB instead of Google, then Google won’t be able to make money, which means they won’t be able to pay all their brilliant software engineers who write all the fancy code to make their search results more relevant… which means… the demise of Google.
Personally, I don’t think that Google will go away completely (I hope not), but its significance on the web could definitely be greatly diminished by the advent of FB.
himanshu chanda
I guess you are anti-SEO from the depth of your heart 🙂 but dont worry Google knows that too.
If one clicks on the- ‘More Search tools’ and than ‘Latest’ link on the left nav bar while searching something it throws up a nice latest updates on the topic. Currently all the tweets on the search are also shown. FB updates are yet to come (Probably bing will have them before Google).
Also I have noticed if you are loggedin into Google and your twitter profile is shared with Google profile (I did this long back, so dont remember how to exactly do that) whenever you search something you Followers/ Your @ mentions are also populated in the search… even though you are not searching the latest updates.
I guess SEO has long evolved from just 10 pithy Search links to a “universal search” format where it considers Social media too.. If it affects Search business SE will not take it lightly 🙂
Abey John
Whats developing on facebook is another form of spam: the astroturfed profile. You have these fake profiles that garners users and then stuffs crap down your throat. Not yet a huge menace but that will eventually evolve into personas and other marketing profiles that pretend to be human and skew authenticity again. FB is not the “pure” social hang out anymore. Imagine a thousand gurus springing up around GDC and gathering clumps of GDC attendees. Companies have pages that can interact like regular users. Quasi legit spam: “Oh check out our awesome chicken curry flavor ice cream”…. Relevance dead in the water again.
And from what I’ve heard FB has loosened their TOS to allow you to create fake profiles – after a manner of speaking. The game is monetization – if that means some shit flies around – so be it. Granted it will be harder to game FB search but its not that its not going to happen. This aint a temple.
I think thats your main gripe Alok: the loss of authenticity in the search results. With whats happening on FB these days that holy grail is not going to be happen there too.
Nice find Himanshu. Looks like Goog is not sittin on the sidelines and countin crows. I’ve also heard similar rumors in the grapevine though not seen much of it in my results. What what I’ve heard they’re also spearing the social graph and trying to skew search results based on what they know about your friends and contacts (on and off FB). I wouldn’t be surprised if they are already mining your contacts lists and spitting search results at least in private beta. One fine day they’ll drop the privacy mini skirt they still cling to and announce “in the interests of a more fulfilling and rewarding search experience we’ve demolished your wall of privacy. And oh yes, you can use your hands to cover your privates….”
Abey John
man, i just regurgitated what i said earlier. total internet memory loss!
Abey John
Tarantara….announcing the Facebook EdgeRank….Facebook rank gaming ON 🙂
https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/6-tips-to-increase-your-facebook-edgerank-and-exposure/
Koshy T
If facebbook and google marries their solution it can be a killer. Google today also integrates humongous amount of information from sources other than posts. The pagerank is stronger in relevance mapping today.
I am not sure if facebook will kill Google
Abey John
Will this be the google killer? Bing adds like button to search results.
https://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/05/16/news-announcement-may-17.aspx
https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385459,00.asp
Abey John
Jyothi, yes, like can help improve result quality. Search engines are totally dumb animals. All they see are words. They try to infer quality (and therefore ranking) by a form of citation analysis. This is an extension of the research paper publishing practices in western universities: the importance of a paper is judged by how many other people cite that paper in their work. Totally screwy but from a dumb machine’s point of view the only viable method … for now.
Both Bing and Google are already doing using like, twitter, and other “social” signals in ranking the results. If my reading is correct Bing will now explicitly show the likes next to the result. This will (should) influence click throughs to the result with more likes. Of course if there is a mismatch between relevance and intent then no amount of likes will help.
In itself I doubt this will make people switch from Google to Bing but user expectations are high wrt quality of search results so this is another push in that direction. For the large majority Google is like Colgate: it does what it promises to do. They dont have a reason to switch unless there is a leapfrog in search result quality. Bing doesn’t do that. Even with all that bitch and gripe in NYT over the JC Penney rankings and the resulting “correction”, any improvements in search quality are going to be incremental.
This is, if you drill down to the bottom, a limitation of empirical analysis and not really a technology issue.
To deliver truly high quality search results we need an AI who digests the entire corpus of human knowledge (with all its dichotomies) which is then hooked into the search engine. To some extent we’ve solved the intent issue – eg if someone types in vacuum cleaning the search engine can (or should be able to!) figure out that this is an informational search and will pull results that will explains vacuum cleaning – how to do it, limitations, etc. On the other hand if someone types in vacuum cleaner the intent has shifted since this is the noun form – so they are either looking to buy a vacuum cleaner or looking for reviews of vacuum cleaner models to help in their purchase decision.
So if we have this mythical Deep Thought AI it can gauge intent and deliver the most useful result to the user. That will be the Google killer…till then we leverage the wisdom of the crowds…