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Implications for the Future
As I hinted at the beginning of this article, we’re seeing Facebook put more resources toward search, and as you have read, you can see that over time they’ve begun to focus more on the relationship between Facebook and the rest of the web. The edges we’ve discussed combine to create what’s called the social graph, which is a global map of everybody and how they’re related. Facebook, being the largest social network, has by far the most extensive social graph. Certainly, this graph is too complicated to visualize in its entirety, but the data helps Facebook and other companies that use its API create interesting and useful social applications.
Similarly, Google has a huge map of relationships between web pages, and uses its PageRank and other algorithms to rank results to search queries, as well as to give us pictures of what’s going on in the world based on how it searches. Now, Facebook is extending edges to web pages, and the implication is that they will have a map similar to Google’s but socially-oriented.
What’s more, while Google’s fundamental DNA building block and biggest advantage over Facebook has been the keyword, Facebook has moved more and more toward bridging that gap. Not only can Facebook ads use precise interests, which are basically keywords people put in their own profiles to describe themselves and what they like, but Facebook also has begun grouping posts based on keyword-like topics. They can do that because they’re now analyzing and parsing Facebook posts for keywords. All of this means Facebook is developing the data infrastructure to do even more Google-like things with information on Facebook and on sites across the web.
It’s impossible to tell how this will manifest, but I see it as a gathering storm that may create competitive problems for Google in the future. If Facebook can use this data to create useful alternatives to Google search, because users already spend so much time on Facebook, Google and other search engines could see a dramatic decrease in usage, and this could spell the end of Google’s era of dominance.