Could we be seeing this sort of search box from Facebook soon? Let me discuss an idea I had that Facebook could actually do: launch a search engine for the web. Outrageous? Maybe. Possible? Read on for my strategy for how Facebook could do this.
I remember when Friendster was the social network that could do no wrong. Then MySpace was the cool place to be. Now Facebook is the social network of the day, claiming almost 500 million users or 7% of the world’s population. That’s a lot. 28% of Facebook users are from the U.S., meaning that it’s a global service (not just one country). This is important when launching a general search engine.
Here’s the Facebook usage by country chart:
500 million is a large number. But not all of them use the service. Regardless of the exact number of users the bottom line is Facebook is popular. The 6-year old company has raised a ton of capital and is used by grandmas, grandkids and people in between. What began as a cool way to hookup at Harvard has turned into a new kind of directory: people and their interests.
The people web.
It is this people web that is beating Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others who think the web is only about broadcasting information to people rather than connecting people to information and each other. In 1995 I first met Jerry Yang, the founder of Yahoo. I discussed with him and his executive team the media revenue models and how Yahoo was in many ways like broadcast TV. It published content for an audience to consume. This is largely what sites such as Twitter do also, a one-way information flow.
AOL in its early days was a “people web” also: chat was its #1 use before it lost its way.
The big question is what’s next for Facebook and can it win long term?
As it becomes more mainstream Facebook is now at the point where its popularity is a strength and a weakness. I’ve seen this many times before with companies who get the spotlight and then fade. Facebook has been adding features such as status updates, mobile applications, location services and more in order to absorb where the social web is going. It also has the issue of user privacy that’s becoming a problem for some very vocal users. The service itself could use a lot more features, etc.
But the big item most people seemed to have missed is that Facebook is actually a real threat to Google not as a social network but more than that: Facebook as search engine.
Imagine that Facebook decides to launch its own web search engine and make it the default on every Facebook page. Facebook already serves more pages than 260 BILLION page views per month, more than Google or any other site. In the time it took you to read this Facebook has served more than 7 million page views. 50 percent of users log on any given day, 35 million users update status, and users share more than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news, blog posts, videos, photos, music and more) – every day.
Now that it’s passed Google in page views the next target may be Google search.
With over 30,000 web servers humming day and night and more being added, Facebook could now have the scale and processing power needed to be able to dethrone Google in web search.
The 3-point strategy for how Facebook Could Challenge Google in web search:
1) Facebook users have already share billions of web links and do so all the time. In effect, this is a “social page rank” algorithm that makes creating a search index of the web a natural step. And since 200 million people login and use Facebook daily it’s a much more timely real-time search than a plain search engine’s slower weekly or monthly crawl.
2) Facebook knows its users’ interests, friends, age, sex, educational level, affiliations, workplace, and more – all valuable in creating services such as dating, job hunting, banking, gaming and more. Google lacks that overall knowledge of its users who type in a box and leave Google’s site for the web. That’s why Google launched Google Buzz. But Buzz is way behind Facebook on many levels, mainly users.
3) Facebook opened up its platform to developers with the Facebook API program. This spawned companies such as Zynga (#1 video gaming) and also paved the way for Facebook Connect, a single sign-on service being used by hundreds of thousands of websites now. Having an API like this creates a multiplier effect expanding Facebook as a platform into all parts of the web. This web “awareness” is another key to search.
All Facebook has to do now is commit to the idea of launching a web search engine and do it. If it does then it’s the only real threat Google has in global search so far. And it could very well win.