Facebook’s future as a search engine

A roundtable hosted at the Emerging Technology Conference at MIT puts money on Facebook doing search better than Google.

I have long been saying that Google is broken.  When you want a PR company in Huddersfield and get 92,000 items back, you know it’s broken (there are only 146,000 people in Huddersfield and some of them will be children — is every adult in the town really a PR professional?).  There are, in fact, no more than ten PR companies in the town and not one of them has a direct link from Page 1 of Google when you search for them.  Either Google is useless and we just take it all for granted (it still has 80% of market share) or there are no SEO companies in Huddersfield helping the PR companies out (not the case: Google says there are 11,800…).

The problem with Google’s search is that every time I ask it for something, it forgets that we ever spoke.  It is like going up to a stranger in the street and saying “PR company, Huddersfield” in terms of the value of what you get back.  Strike that, because a stranger is likely to be honest enough to say they can’t help you.

The thing is that offline, we would never go back to anyone and ask for their help if they just gave us rubbish every time we asked them.  We’d go straight to those folks we know and trust to give a personal recommendation and a reliable answer.  This is what we all hoped Ask might do some years back.  And this is perhaps where Facebook is better qualified than Google.

Josh Catone’s blog at Sitepoint reports on a roundtable at EMT hosted by Robert Scoble which had Dave Morin from Facebook, David Recordon from Six Apart, Joseph Smarr from Plaxo, and Nova Spivack from Radar Networks on the panel.  What emergedas a dicussion about the power that social networks could give search to make results much more relevant.

Imagine asking someone for a PR company in Huddersfield, but they know why you might be asking because of the job you have.  And them asking other people in Huddersfield, or perhaps even people you know who know about PR, before they give you a reply.  OK, Facebook may in fact not be the best place for business related searches.  But their database holds the details of more than 100 million people, including who their relations and friends are, where they live, where they work, what they like doing, what movies and books they like, where they go on holiday and a whole lot more.  Beacon was a clumsy attempt at presenting endorsements to help influence the buying decisions of others and there is little doubt that Mark Zuckerberg knows what he is sitting on.  But perhaps what is really needed is a holistic and contextual search which means no matter what you type into Facebook (for example, clubs in Huddersfield),  you get back results based on why I might be asking (do I list clubbing as an activity I enjoy, or is it book clubs?) and what people I know (or who they trust) have to say about them.

Personal referrals from people you trust are always ranked higher than spurious recommendations from strangers in real life.  How long can it be until social networks exploit this fact online and change the face of search forever?

Google has to be scared.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

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