As a social media developer, it was absolutely exciting to attend the F8 Facebook conference in San Francisco. Probably the most memorable quote of the conference was from Zuckerberg: “We are building a web where the default is Social”, and as many other bloggers have done — I’m going to dive further into what this means.
Search Engines are Secondary?
This may seem controversial, but I genuinely believe that Facebook is going to dominate search with social. Think about the way you interact with a search engine. You type in a string of keywords, hit go and begin skimming the headlines which by default are fetched based upon relevancy and location (search engines can’t grab your exact location, but they can get pretty close based on IP). The problem with this, is that while search engines have very complex and amazing algorithms to compute relevancy, they can’t access personal data about the user other than the ISP and browser data. Facebook however, has a robust amount of information on each user, as well as the users’ network and friends. Facebook could easily adopt or merge with another company like Yahoo and have all the services that competitors like google search and bing have, but they can add in a new layer of complexity on top.. they can aggregate the user’s content and content among friends and provide results very specific to the user while defaulting to standard results as a backup. Let’s explore a hypothetical so that it’s easier to understand:
There is odd weather as you’re driving through Colorado. There’s been heavy hail and rain and you’re worried about the possibility of a tornado. You pull out your phone and do a quick search…
Typical search results via Google:
When you initialize this search, Google runs its algorithm on already collected data, and shows you content relative based on credibility of the site, meta data, and content. So maybe a site dedicated to tornado photography is on the top of the list, because it has hundreds of pages featuring content about Tornadoes in Colorado. Google is trying to solve this with “recent news” feed that pings other media/news sites for data that’s more current, but it’s not very robust or accurate, especially about news that isn’t popular or published much on the web. Real time results get populated fastest in Social not Search.
Facebook “hypothetical” Results:
Remember this is hypothetical, but if Facebook chooses to, this could very quickly become real. When you initialize the facebook search for the same string tornado in CO it could first aggregate across data from you and your network. Facebook would look for friends located in Colorado or part of a network/group based in CO. It could then rank your friends in order of relevancy by location and finally pull in data related to tornadoes that they user has posted. This is far more valuable than the way search engines currently work because it adds another layer of data which is in many cases far more relevant to you.
What do you think? Do you agree that Facebook may stand as a direct competitor to companies like Google?