Facebook Must Change Search Engine in Order to Rival Google in Search and Discovery

February 20th, 2010 by Daniel Young | Filed under Search, Social media.

Recent data from Compete and comScore shows that Facebook has passed Google to become the top source of traffic to major portals. The announcement and the resulting discussion prompted this post by Facebook, which includes the following section:

According to comScore, Google still has nearly two-thirds of the U.S. search market, but dropped a fraction of a percent from 65.7% in Dec 2009 to 65.4% in Jan 2010 [source: Information Week]. While Google is still the leader in the search space, and Facebook only accounted for just under 400 million searches in January, that is a gain of 13% over December. If this trend continues, Google may have ample reason to fear Facebook.

The Compete data shows that Facebook is the second most popular site in the US with 134m unique visiter in January 2010, ahead of Yahoo! and just behind Google.

Facebook is in the ascendancy but the company must make changes to its own Search engine if it is to become a genuine rival to Google, the vastly dominant player in the space.

Facebook, like other social networks, represents opportunity for brands because of the simple fact that this is where a lot of the action is taking place online, as demonstrated by slews and rising traffic. Switched on brands are already tapping into the Facebook community. But Facebook Search serves marketers poorly today as a place of discovery. Check out my search results for ‘mobile handset’:

Not particularly useful. Three users groups with 210 members between them.

No sign of the brand sponsored pages where Facebook Users can learn about new products, participate in competitions and promotions, chat with other users and potential customers, communicate directly with the company and link through to relevant pages on the Web.

The Sony Ericsson WorldPage has more than 445,ooo Fans (Sony Ericsson is a client) but the way that Facebook Search works prevents this page, which is clearly relevant to the search term, from appearing.

This is an issue for Facebook.

We see the same issue if we run a search for ’sneakers’:

The retailer Sole Provider Sneakers comes out on top here, simply by virtue of having the search term embedded in its company name (also the name of the Page). Yet Sole Provider Sneakers sells a lot of Nike trainers and a search for ‘Nike’ would not have produced their Page in its results.

Facebook has to play a delicate balancing act here. Ultimately, user activity, personal profiles, user content, sharing and discussion are the currency of social networks such as Facebook. The company needs to avoid giving users the impression that they are being marketed to via the network, failure to do this could well become its undoing.

One way around this could be for Facebook to adopt a model similar to Google’s Universal Search, which would allow users to chose and filter the types of results that are presented to them via Facebook Search. This could be built into the privacy settings that Facebook has been so keen to promote recently.

Interestingly, Google listed Facebook as a formal competitor for the first time in a recent 10K filing, as reported by SearchEngineLand:

Our business is characterized by rapid change and converging, as well as new and disruptive, technologies. We face formidable competition in every aspect of our business, particularly from companies that seek to connect people with information on the web and provide them with relevant advertising. We face competition from:

Traditional search engines, such as Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corporation’s Bing.
Vertical search engines and e-commerce sites, such as WebMD (for health queries), Kayak (travel queries), Monster.com (job queries), and Amazon.com and eBay (commerce). We compete with these sites because they, like us, are trying to attract users to their web sites to search for product or service information, and some users will navigate directly to those sites rather than go through Google.
Social networks, such as Facebook, Yelp, or Twitter. Some users are relying more on social networks for product or service referrals, rather than seeking information through traditional search engines. (my emphasis)

Some subtle and simple changes to Facebook Search would accelerate the trend towards Facebook and other social networks as a primary channel for Search.

The challenge for marketers will (continue to be) to resist the tempation to sell via social networks and to engage with social networking users in a way that adds value, build relationships, earns trust and facilitates creativity and connectivity. Facebook will have to manage the sensitivities of its users delicately but if managed well Facebook could become a natural home to Search, delivering value to users and marketers alike.