Comments on: Facebook – Google rivalry has Net at stake

By: Vivek Puri

Vivek Puri — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:51:59 +0000

Sim, In my PoV, new players succeed in following scenarios – Incumbent with high cost(Siebel-Salesforce, NyTimes_classifieds-Craigslist), existing players not maintaining or dying – Maven networks, tons of money in advertising(Bing – hasn’t succeeded, but at least traffic is up), hosted-downloaded(wordpress), opensource-proprietary(jboss..). And Facebook has added a new criteria – build hosting scale. Given they have mastered this, I suspect FB to launch out-n-out search engine, as compared to trying to improve the social search.

Reasoning behind this – sum of my questions every day is far more than what my friends on FB know and would ever know. Like you are not my friend on Facebook. So are tons of other people who indirectly answer our questions via google. I dont think all of them can ever be our friends, and i dont really want them to be for answering 1 time questions. As for asking social questions – like, best place to eat in NYC, best view of Grand Canyon, …., there have been facebook apps like – My Questions(from Slide.com, now deadpooled) and new playser – vark.com. But that’s like Yahoo Answers. All that means – if you really want good results on FB, add tons of friends or everyone is everyones friend. And that is not going to happen

By: Simeon Simeonov

Simeon Simeonov — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:15:03 +0000

Larry, don’t think about the present. Think about the future. Facebook would want you to ask your friends, for example, about a dentist recommendation rather than looking for a top-rated dentist through Google. It’s a significant behavioral shift. It is possible IMO but only if the FB search can become reasonably generic or else people will never think of it as search per se but as a special-purpose recommendation app.

By: larrycheng

larrycheng — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:10:15 +0000

Sim – I don’t get it though I’ve read the wired article and various blogs on this topic. I do 98% of my searches on Google. Maybe 2% on twitter. And 0% on FB. What % of your searches are on FB?