Is Facebook a threat to Google? First Facebook buys FriendFeed, a service that instantaneously aggregates information from social media sites. Then Facebook rolls out an improved search system, enabling users to browse through posts by friends, by Facebook users who have elected to go public, and by Web results — all in real time.
Asking whether or not Facebook is a threat to Google is key because as social networking is gaining popularity — unique visitors to Twitter, for example, grew 950 percent in the past year, according to July data from Web analytics firm Compete — more and more people are sharing information in real time, whether through status updates, tweets, photos or links. The need to track and sort through everything that has been posted is changing “search” as we know it. How?
First: The increased need for speed. While Twitter hasn’t replaced traditional journalism, for example, it has become a hub for breaking stories, with users tweeting about events like the February Turkish Airlines crash as it happened. Services like FriendFeed collect updates like this from sites like Twitter, notifies you about them, and allows you to search through all the posted data instantly. Meanwhile, traditional search, such as the kind Google does, indexes information from the Web only periodically. Google might therefore need to speed up its indexing to strengthen its market lead.
In an interview earlier this year with TechCrunch, Google Co-Founder Larry Page admitted: "I have always thought we needed to index the Web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it."
But why did Facebook, which already had a service akin to Friendfeed — its News Feed — still buy the company? Some, like CNET News and BusinessWeek, say that it’s a talent acquisition, as FriendFeed engineers are mostly ex-Googlers who helped build Web services like Google Talk, Google Maps, and Gmail. In any case, Facebook stands to learn and benefit from FriendFeed’s features. In the official press release, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor noted that they will “bring many of the innovations…developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”
Second: The increased need for relevancy. When the World Health Organization raised the pandemic alert on swine flu in April, social media blog Mashable reported more than 10,000 tweets per hour about the virus. Indeed, the constant stream of updates on sites like Facebook or Twitter makes it difficult to monitor relevant posts or sift through data. It’s crucial, therefore, to have an advanced search function that enables users to filter noise from news — a technology such as the one offered by FriendFeed, where you can even search for keywords.
Google already has an advanced search function, but it doesn’t have real-time results just yet. That is why analysts from media and technology publications like TechCrunch and BoomTown think a Google/Twitter team-up would be the right move, especially as Facebook’s reach expands. While Google has kept mum on this possibility, it did recently unveil “Google Caffeine,” an upgraded version that speeds up its search results and promises improved accuracy, size and comprehensiveness.
For now, it’s too early to see whether Facebook will be able to do in search what it had done in social networking. Nevertheless, Google needs to speed up searches to real time if it wants to stay ahead in the rapidly-evolving search race.
