The battleground between Google and Facebook just came a little bit clearer with Facebook’s much-anticipated announcement of social graph search. As Google and Facebook approach social search from two different sides, it still isn’t clear if there needs to be a single winner and if so who that might be.
Since its launch back in June 2011, Google has been quietly stitching their wide suite of products together, integrating them into a single ecosystem to the point where Google+ is Google to all purposes. And although it has been used mainly by early adopters and Google employees, the relentless development based on the power of search and Google’s overarching vision means it is here to stay.
Is there a single winner in Google and Facebook’s straight fight for users?
This is what Google is doing with its Search All Your World product; if you search the web while logged into Google+, friends’ activity gets rated higher than generic results. With both sites you can now visit a restaurant that someone you know has recommended and feel more confident that it will meet your expectations.
Across the wider web, Google launches smaller product enhancements – friends’ search results, authorship. local business pages, communities – all hooks to get you into a seamless personalised web, driven by your Google+ profile.
Within Facebook, searches will now become more personalised and more powerful because returns will be prioritised on how much weight your friends give to something – again rating your friends’ activity higher in search results, driven by their and your previous Facebook activity.
To avoid this becoming a stale and closing circle, both Facebook and Google+ have also touted their potential to connect strangers around common interests – using the searches to extend your network and enhance your online experiences.
This extreme integration while maintaining users’ trust will be the biggest challenge to both approaches – although it really seems to be the same approach from different directions. The battleground between Google and Facebook may be a shared hunting ground instead. Privacy concerns will continue to be a red flag in both cases – are you disciplined enough and technologically aware enough to maintain some privacy in your settings as this activity becomes normalised?
No doubt both Google and Facebook are intent on enriching our online experiences, along with providing lots of new opportunity for businesses to step in and explore/exploit this rich data, but if there needs to be a single winner it will surely be the system that can inspire most trust in their users?
What do you think about these issues? Will Facebook’s approach inspire more loyalty or annoy people with oversharing and inaccurate results? Does Google’s approach mean that your search results are too narrow and prevent you from trying anything new? I would love to discuss your views in the comments below.
i hear all the fuss and the issues with privacy and so on but I can’t help get the feeling all this facebook vs. google+ stuff is a gambit. i don’t see the value in facebook or google’s social search to the wider audience. take me for example, i went to to a gorgeous Moroccan restaurant the other, i am not the check-into-facebook kind of person and my colleagues phone was on the blink, we both loved the restaurant but facebook will never know. google+ has no chance, the only reason i opened an account was because i felt sorry for the unpopular kid and didn’t want to see him left out.
what else of real value does facebook know about my likes, ok, i might hit like on stuff if it appears at the right moment on my newsfeed and i feel like sharing my like of it. just because i like it doesn’t mean i’m going to make anything of it. anyway, i reckon what will happen is that data mining will be allowed as long as the data is anonymised. i may be wrong, i am no expert on social search, i’m just having a moment …
so lets continue
why do i think its a gambit – well, i think the gold-dust is the data that banks and shopping markets hold about us. natwest knows i went to the Moroccan restaurant. doesn’t know what i ate but will know whether i went back or not. banks know where i buy my clothes, where i do my food shopping. if you put together the data that banks, supermarkets, retail outlets, airlines, etc have about me that poops all over any information facebook has about me.
so thats the gambit, facebook and google spend loads of money on legal processes which allow data to be mined if it is anonymous and develop the tools to do it, then the banks rolls in and make the serious dosh.
just a thought
Thanks for your comment, I think you make some very interesting points. A machine will not understand or predict the same things for you as a friend, it will only base its recommendations on what it has gathered from your online behaviour – and as you say this is very sketchy at times and not representative of the nuances of ‘real life’ between people. The interesting thing is where offline and online meet and how that is shifting, how your online behaviour is or is not connected to what you do offline – as younger people grown up with this technology does that line move or blur, and will there be a division in the future?