Google and Facebook gear up to fight for social search
Recently it seems that Google can’t make enough enemies – once their primary target may have been Microsoft but if Google’s attitude to Apple is anything to go by Redmond’s lot seem positively irrelevant these days. And if the rumours surrounding Google Me are anything to go by it sounds like Facebook just made the top of the hate-list.
Me is allegedly Google’s attempt to move on the ‘full service’ social network space that is Facebook (yes, I did just coin a social media description) but despite rumours proclaiming this as a major deal it is difficult not to be just a little bit cynical. We have already seen Google launch both Wave and Buzz to ridiculous hype rapidly followed by almost laughable silence weeks after their respective launches – why should Me be any different? And more importantly, why is Google not focusing on joining up all of their various social hooks into something that makes sense? At present they have a variety of different social offerings yet most of them act like the others don’t exist – from Google Voice and Chat through to Buzz, Wave and even Google Reader (with its built in sharing settings) the graph may usually move between them but little else does.
So maybe that is all Google Me really is – a platform to pull together all of Google’s other platforms. Yet it is already being labelled a competitor to Facebook – this despite the fact that having to rebuild a whole new social graph on a new social network is about as enjoyable as actually being forced to converse with most of those forgotten school friends you could passively ignore before the days of Facebook.
So why bother? Well it probably has something to do with the fact that Facebook overtook Google in the US earlier this year to become the biggest site in terms of visits and it shows no sign of slowing. Whilst Google’s core offering (adverts served against search results) doesn’t currently directly compete with Facebook’s (adverts served against personal content) Google have to be more than just a little bit conscious that it wouldn’t take much for Facebook to make a move into their space.
What makes Google great? They have vast amounts of data about sites, the relationships between sites and the ways in which people access those sites. And what do Facebook have? Vast amounts of data about people, the relationships between people and, since the introduction of the ‘like’ button, the ways in which people access and share sites.
Facebook have recently started including sites with ‘like’ functionality into the search results a user receives when they search for anything on the Facebook site. But to be brutally honest, it’s horrible – there is no relevance to the results and it doesn’t fit with the user behaviour for people on the site. Yet it isn’t inconceivable that Facebook could buy a search engine and if you began to lay social graph data combined with content consumption habits you could have the next evolution of search: results that are socially aware. Imagine a result page where the sites your friends visit frequently get a little boost in the results for your searches.
The social search engine has seemed an obvious next step for years and yet still hasn’t happened – probably partly because no single company has had the relevant data sets, they have typically sat in separate businesses. Of course let’s not forget that privacy concerns are likely to be a huge factor too, since search is just so personal. Yet packaged in the right way, whereby both sharing and privacy controls are simple and straightforward, it becomes a tantalising prospect.
Facebook have said search isn’t their focus (but they would, wouldn’t they) yet Google’s continued focus on building relationship data certainly suggests that social search may be the future.
Ultimately Google Me will still crash and burn if it can’t offering something unique that Facebook doesn’t – trying to move a population of 400 million to a new home is no mean feat – but if Google spies a threat to their core search business then you can be sure they are about to throw everything they can at the social space.
This story was originally posted at The Wall.
Tags: Facebook, Google, personalised search, search, social search
