I think Google does a great job at what it does and so does Facebook. However, I doubt that Facebook would be successful as a search engine.

I can only make a comparison between mac or pc seeing that both giants are considered an end all be all.

People had a really easy time making a switch from PC to Mac, mainly because it truly was just better, I think both Facebook and Google in a broad sense are comparable to a PC in terms of shine, but certainly not lovability.

Seeing how both platforms educate, or allow users to customize their experience will play a big role in how the public perceives both. Facebook could very well move into search and Google into social, but I think currently the public is educated to recognize the two distinctly different interfaces as two entirely different services, so no matter how good they might become under the hood, how the interface is presented will decide how they perceived.

Perhaps Facebook turning into search and Google turning into social will cause both platforms to resemble each other, or perhaps they will become vastly different from each other, moving even further away from each other in terms of service diversity.

just ranting…

Long live social networking! Facebook best!

Despite all of the marketing hype about the “Google Slap” and the recent big publicity of Facebook, when you do the research, Google continues to be the #1 site in existence, year after year outperforming everyone else.

I’ll let everyone in on a little secret. Do you know why a lot of internet marketers pushed to use Facebook instead of Google? No one can exactly pin point the time, however I found that there were two major things happening at the same time, that I strongly believed contributed to what I call “The Great Facebook Migration” – and it is in part responsible for the major moves Facebook has been making to capitalize on it.

Back in 2007-2008, the Federal gov’t started cracking down on credit card companies for what they called practices unfair to consumers, but it didn’t stop at things like credit card rates.

Credit card companies cracked down in what we now know is the Wallet Pop. There was a major backlash in the business world that wasn’t talked about. The focus, because of the economy, was on the banks.

What we didn’t see was that the banks passed the buck to the business for their practices, and the credit card companies began to hold companies responsible for their bad practices. When they did their research, only a small percentage, (I believe it was around 6 or 7 percent), of their profits came from re-billing, but the highest chargebacks (around the 90 percent range) was also from re-billing.

They really changed up the game and changed the rules. Whole Internet-based models were suddenly illegal on the back end and people were going out of business – mostly internet marketers and home-based businesses that bought into using models that had continuity-based subscriptions on the back end.

The credit card companies focused mostly on large corporations which didn’t trickle down for a while. Then Google took the initiative and started cracking down on Adwords, etc. for sites that was now illegal, and they changed up the policy to exclude certain types of ad practices as well.

Remember Google’s focus at the time was to improve quality of search results and the crackdown gave them the perfect opportunity to capitalize on what was going on and to not just stay, but dominate the market share. If you do the market research and look back at the history, the number match up.

The irony is that if a lot of people actually read the policy notices they would have know what to do to avoid it, but of course many of them don’t, and suddenly a lot of Internet marketers found it much more difficult to do their campaigns and many went out of business.

They went to the one place that allowed them to continue doing what they were doing and that gave birth to the Google slap and the big rush to Facebook. We’ve all seen the hype about how Facebook is now how Google was back then and so on.

The brains behind Facebook capitalized on this sudden change and then came the great Facebook advertising rush. On every profile the ads came up “Advertise on Facebook” and then they started improving on everything business and marketing related from changes in ad templates to groups.

Take a look at the demographics for Facebook’s and Google’s traffic. First, a very large portion of Facebook’s traffic comes from search engines.

If Facebook wants to compete, they need to do more than just say “Gmail isn’t a real product” because quite frankly, it is, and a darned good one, but even more than that, Google already is everywhere from desktop computers to phones, apps, 75% of the search engine share, and with the new partnering series, they’ve acquired, Google will be in your home through television – Google TV is already in Beta.

On top of that, according to the latest Alexa.com studies, the time spent in a typical visit to Facebook is roughly 32 minutes, with 34 seconds spent on each pageview, vs Google’s hours, with several minutes per pageview.

Studies also show that Google is more popular among the widest range of internet users across all demographics, where as Facebook leans more towards, (according to Alexa.com), “disproportionately women under the age of 45.”

If you do the same research on Quantcast.com, the numbers back up Alexa.com.

Facebook goes search? They can try but it’s not going to work unless they have some major, major changes.

They would first have to improve their public standing across all demographics first and foremost. There is no question, no two ways about it, and no way around it. Facebook right now is not friendly to a lot of the demographics.

The bad news is that Facebook, while their attention and traffic is rising, is not making any changes to address those issues. And as of right now, Facebook continues to have lower customer satisfaction and privacy issues.

The upside though is that, considering women are a huge lion’s share of buyers, Facebook does tend to favor that demographic. That’s good news for advertisers to target that demographic.

You also can’t ever eliminate Google as a viable solution. A lot of internet marketers will continue to push for the Facebook switch and most will talk bad about Google, however, in spite of all of the Facebook is #1 talk, Google continues to dominate as king of the hill in the #1 spot year after year.

Facebook has a very tough climb if they are to effectively compete with Google, or, instead of changing their game to compete, they can do what Myspace did and stay in their demographic and dominate. Good luck to any other social site trying to get a growing share of entertainment to compete with them.

I think Facebook is shooting themselves in the foot. The more they are trying to do, the more alienated consumers are becoming. If I could sit down and tell Facebook execs where their strengths are, I would say to capitalize on their foothold on social network.

Their strength has always been the direct reach to consumers on a personal level and that’s what they need to capitalize on because their social nature is what made their success to begin with.

If anyone is interested in the demographics and research, I’ll be glad to send them a copy of the report along with a free market analysis of your own product or service. Just visit, http://blog.techdex.net

Dexter
TechDex Development & Solutions

I hope FaceBook does search and compete against google.. Google needs to be cut down, they are working with the government about monitoring the internet, and of course google is wanting to help the government so the two can monitor and control everything we do on the web just like china does. A very bad combination. Google has great stuff, but now they want power and control to secure there position just like the government wants more power and control. I think Im feeling ill.

Facebooks’ capacity of socializing the entire world wide web and also stepping forward as a marketing platform. Google had been ranking 10the no.1 search engine for so many years where Facebook is also no.1 social network. If someone has to do what the other does then it’ll be chaos..

This sounds crap.. Facebook + Search = FaceOogle
Google + Social = GoogFace

not funny right..

I think that this would blur the lines. I could be wrong but I think both have a unique place.

As a web developer and part of a large corporation, and into communications, I would immediatly throw my computer and every server and computer in the building into the nearest dumpsters and quit if Facebook goes any further. I, for one, like most web developers I know, and as well many respectable corporations and businesses block Facebook on their internal networks anyways – reason is, employees would be on it all the time and do nothing else. We already see how it has turned people into addicted idiots with no life and “socializing’ in cyberspace rather than the real thing. Now to add search? Everything will soon be @ Facebook. We already see some companies advertisiong their company as www.facebook.com/companyname !! Talk about losing ones identy, now we are losing the corporate identy to Facebook.

Yes, 500 million people CAN be wrong.

It is just me that thinks the internet world is big enough for both Facebook and Google as they offer two completely different services. You go to google to find what you are looking for, you go to Facebook to catch up with your friends, not be given a load of information based on your social graph (although you get this without a choice now).

I use both services a lot and for completely different things. If I were at either company I would be pushing for them to perfect the services they currently (which at times are quite flawed – privacy anyone?!) offer rather than trying to compete with each other. This would make the internet a lot better as a whole!

I don;t know enough to comment. I prefer for them to stay- as is. This appears to be greedy on Googles part.