If there is one thing that is likely to make a massive dent in Google’s market share and profits it is when Facebook reaches out beyond its own wall.
At the moment external websites do come up in Facebook search, but only when they have been added by the community and are popular enough to feature in the search index.
However, it appears that Facebook has filed a patent application for its own search engine called ”Ranking search results based on the frequency of clicks on the search results by members of a social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation“, and it is assumed that this search engine will be crawling the Internet to provide Facebook users a portal to the rest of the World from the comfort of their FB homepages.
Search results, including sponsored links and algorithmic search results, are generated in response to a query, and are marked based on frequency of clicks on the search results by members of social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation from the member who submitted the query. The markers are visual tags and comprise either a text string or an image. – Facebook patent for search
Once Facebook have extended to global web search, they could then extend to global advertising. At the moment the biggest player by far for contextual advertising is Google with its Adwords/Adsense products. However, Facebook advertising is growing rapidly as businesses realise that they can get much more targeted advertising to their new customers with Facebook.
If Facebook can roll this out to all websites, so that rather than displaying adverts withing Facebook they display them on the publisher network, this will certainly hurt Google.
With over 700 million users Facebook is a force to be reckoned with. While Google works on its on social networking platform, Facebook is working towards invading Google’s most lucrative business areas – advertising.
