How Facebook could beat Google as a search engine
Greetings, habrovchane!
I present to you the translation of the article by IT analyst-entrepreneur-investor Steve Germon about Google ’s most dangerous rival .
Is it possible that we will soon see such a search box from Facebook? Let me share an idea of what Facebook could do: Launch a search engine on the world wide web. Strange idea? May be. Real? Check out my strategy on how Facebook can do this.
I remember the days when Friendster was a social network that could do anything. Then came MySpace - also a good place to spend time. Now they are replaced by Facebook - the social network of today, claiming that they have almost 500 million users, which is 7% of the global population. It's a lot. Only 28% of users, inhabitants of Facebook from America, it says that this is a worldwide service, and not just for one country. And this is important for launching a general search engine.
But the schedule of Facebook users by country:
')
500 million is a big number. Of course, not all of them use the service. But regardless of the exact number of users, the main idea - Facebook is popular. The company of six years old earned a lot of money, and everyone uses its services, from grandmothers to grandchildren. What began as a cool communication method for Harvard students has grown into a new directory: people and their interests. Network for people.
This is a network for people ahead of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others who believe that the network is needed simply to transmit information to people, instead of connecting people with information and with each other. In 1995, I first met Jerry Yang, the founder of Yahoo. I discussed with him and his team the model for generating revenue from information and how Yahoo resembles TV broadcasting. He publishes content for people to use. This is what sites like Twitter do - they provide a one-way flow of information.
At the beginning of its existence, AOL was also a “network for people”. Chat was there in the first place until it lost its relevance.
The big question is what will be the next step for Facebook, and what are its advantages in the long run.
Becoming more and more popular, Facebook is coming to the edge where popularity is becoming a plus and a minus at the same time. I have seen such a lot of times when a company takes the lead, and then gradually disappears. Facebook adds new features, such as status updates, mobile apps, GPS, and more, in order to understand what the social network seeks. There is also the topic of user privacy, which becomes a problem for some particularly "chatty" users. However, the service could use significantly more functionality.
But many people seem to have lost sight of this: Facebook is actually Google’s threat not so much as a social network, but rather as a search engine for Facebook.
Imagine that Facebook decides to run its own search engine and put it on default on every Facebook page. Facebook already has more than 260 billion page views per month, more than Google and any other site. During the time you spent reading this, Facebook looked at over 7 million pages. 50 percent of users connect every day, 35 million update their status and share more than a billion different files — links, news, recordings in Bulgaria, videos, photos, music, etc. — every day.
And now, when Facebook has overtaken Google by the number of pages viewed, the next goal could be a Google search.
With 30,000 web servers running day and night, and adding more and more new ones, Facebook has the technical capabilities to compete with Google for web search.
A 3-step strategy for how Facebook can challenge Google in a web search:
1) Facebook users have already shared billions of different links and continue to do so all the time. In fact, the “social page rank” algorithm makes creating a search engine a completely natural step. And since 200 million people connect daily and use Facebook, this provides a much more relevant real-time search than regular search engines, updated once a week or a month.
2) Facebook knows the interests, friends, age, gender, education, membership and jobs of its users, and much more, which is valuable when creating services designed for dating, job search, banking services, games and other things. Google lacks this knowledge of its users, because they simply type the text in the field, and go from Google to other pages. That is why Google launched Google Buzz. But Buzz is inferior to Facebook in many ways, especially in the number of users.
3) Facebook has provided its platform to program developers working with the program interface of the Facebook application. This spawned many companies, such as Zynga (Number One in video game development), and also paved the way for Facebook Connect, a single sign-on service for many sites, which is now used by hundreds and thousands of sites. By doing so with the application's software interface, Facebook launched the process of distributing its platform to all corners of the network. This "awareness" of the social network is one more step to launch the search engine.
All Facebook needs right now is to accept the idea of launching a search engine and execute it. And if he does, then only he can be a real threat to Google in the global search. And he has every chance to win.
I believe that "Everything will pass, it will pass and that." ©
I present to you the translation of the article by IT analyst-entrepreneur-investor Steve Germon about Google ’s most dangerous rival .
Is it possible that we will soon see such a search box from Facebook? Let me share an idea of what Facebook could do: Launch a search engine on the world wide web. Strange idea? May be. Real? Check out my strategy on how Facebook can do this.
I remember the days when Friendster was a social network that could do anything. Then came MySpace - also a good place to spend time. Now they are replaced by Facebook - the social network of today, claiming that they have almost 500 million users, which is 7% of the global population. It's a lot. Only 28% of users, inhabitants of Facebook from America, it says that this is a worldwide service, and not just for one country. And this is important for launching a general search engine.
But the schedule of Facebook users by country:
')
500 million is a big number. Of course, not all of them use the service. But regardless of the exact number of users, the main idea - Facebook is popular. The company of six years old earned a lot of money, and everyone uses its services, from grandmothers to grandchildren. What began as a cool communication method for Harvard students has grown into a new directory: people and their interests. Network for people.
This is a network for people ahead of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others who believe that the network is needed simply to transmit information to people, instead of connecting people with information and with each other. In 1995, I first met Jerry Yang, the founder of Yahoo. I discussed with him and his team the model for generating revenue from information and how Yahoo resembles TV broadcasting. He publishes content for people to use. This is what sites like Twitter do - they provide a one-way flow of information.
At the beginning of its existence, AOL was also a “network for people”. Chat was there in the first place until it lost its relevance.
The big question is what will be the next step for Facebook, and what are its advantages in the long run.
Becoming more and more popular, Facebook is coming to the edge where popularity is becoming a plus and a minus at the same time. I have seen such a lot of times when a company takes the lead, and then gradually disappears. Facebook adds new features, such as status updates, mobile apps, GPS, and more, in order to understand what the social network seeks. There is also the topic of user privacy, which becomes a problem for some particularly "chatty" users. However, the service could use significantly more functionality.
But many people seem to have lost sight of this: Facebook is actually Google’s threat not so much as a social network, but rather as a search engine for Facebook.
Imagine that Facebook decides to run its own search engine and put it on default on every Facebook page. Facebook already has more than 260 billion page views per month, more than Google and any other site. During the time you spent reading this, Facebook looked at over 7 million pages. 50 percent of users connect every day, 35 million update their status and share more than a billion different files — links, news, recordings in Bulgaria, videos, photos, music, etc. — every day.
And now, when Facebook has overtaken Google by the number of pages viewed, the next goal could be a Google search.
With 30,000 web servers running day and night, and adding more and more new ones, Facebook has the technical capabilities to compete with Google for web search.
A 3-step strategy for how Facebook can challenge Google in a web search:
1) Facebook users have already shared billions of different links and continue to do so all the time. In fact, the “social page rank” algorithm makes creating a search engine a completely natural step. And since 200 million people connect daily and use Facebook, this provides a much more relevant real-time search than regular search engines, updated once a week or a month.
2) Facebook knows the interests, friends, age, gender, education, membership and jobs of its users, and much more, which is valuable when creating services designed for dating, job search, banking services, games and other things. Google lacks this knowledge of its users, because they simply type the text in the field, and go from Google to other pages. That is why Google launched Google Buzz. But Buzz is inferior to Facebook in many ways, especially in the number of users.
3) Facebook has provided its platform to program developers working with the program interface of the Facebook application. This spawned many companies, such as Zynga (Number One in video game development), and also paved the way for Facebook Connect, a single sign-on service for many sites, which is now used by hundreds and thousands of sites. By doing so with the application's software interface, Facebook launched the process of distributing its platform to all corners of the network. This "awareness" of the social network is one more step to launch the search engine.
All Facebook needs right now is to accept the idea of launching a search engine and execute it. And if he does, then only he can be a real threat to Google in the global search. And he has every chance to win.
I believe that "Everything will pass, it will pass and that." ©
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/95474/
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