Google's New Social Search Is A Big Chess Move Against Facebook
Web search, real-time search and social search. That's a pretty compelling combination and it's what both Google and Facebook put on the table today in a head-to-head competiton. Google's Marissa Mayer did a short, surprise demo today of an experimental Google feature called Social Search but don't mistake the understated announcement to mean this was a small move. The Web 2.0 Summit today has been jam packed with very big search moves.
Both companies are hoping you'll come to their sites to search for what you're looking for, what people are saying about that topic and what your friends think. Microsoft is very much in the game, too. Here are some things to consider in this search war. It's a new fight - now including the real-time, social web!
The following is our attempt to piece all of this together, but the war rooms of each of these companies are no doubt buzzing trying to put together and understand the same details and more.
Google's new Social Search will allow users to opt-in to having search results from content created by their friends on social networks around the web included in Google search results. Those friend connections could come from any number of sites that you and your friends have listed in your Google Profiles - but it won't include Facebook. That means it won't include very much, unless Twitter and Google Profiles become a lot more integrated.
Microsoft announced today that Facebook status messages and other content from Facebook users with public profiles will soon appear in Bing search results. That's a huge change for Facebook. Bing also announced Twitter search integration, which is live now.
Google announced a deal with Twitter today as well. So Bing has Facebook and Twitter. Facebook has Bing-powered web search. Google just has Twitter, no Facebook search.
Right now Twitter search is probably much bigger than Facebook (unless you're Facebook serving logged-in users), because only a tiny portion of the much larger number of Facebook users have opted-in to making their Facebook activity public. But Facebook has an explicit agenda to change that. One reason for that is that more public Facebook activity makes deals like the one it made with Bing today much more valuable.
More now than ever, Google needs Twitter data to combat Facebook's social dominance - Facebook is five to ten times as big as Twitter today.
Microsoft would rather you did all your searching from Bing but it does own a meaningful portion of Facebook. You can bet it wishes it owned more.
No one is set to be the clear winner here, but with far more social activity and a multi-layered partnership with the first qualified web-search challenger to Google in years (Bing) Facebook may in fact have the strongest hand.
It's going to be a wild ride and big moves are being made right now.
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Allow me to paraphrase...
"No context - no peace!!!"
In other words, cross-pollination between the service providers, a quadrillion-bazillion bytes of new data indexed, served in real time is...useless without a contextual toolkit to cause "meaning".
This isn't an "end game" at all, it's merely aggravating the huge looming problem of context that has yet to be solved.
end of rant
Doesn't Facebook have FriendFeed for Social Search. The number of FriendFeed users is small but that is effectively Socia lSearch.
Atul, that's a good point. I bet there are more people with FriendFeed accounts than there are populated Google Profiles. Now whether those FF accounts are tied to Facebook, or if the FF accounts are tied to Google Profiles, I have no idea. Whee!
This is like watching a feeding frenzy on the Discovery Channel during Shark Week. It's fascinating but you wonder who is going to get eaten up in the process.
To the extend Google can see your friends on any site, it will be able to socialize your searches. So if I choose to link my Facebook profile -- and Facebook lets me put all my friends out in public to non-logged in users (as is becoming more and more the trend) -- it's set.
The real challenge isn't getting your Facebook friend list. The challenge is getting people to establish their Google Profiles in the first place. And then linking those to other accounts. Two big jumps.
Thanks for commenting Danny, but it's not about friends and profiles imho, it's about status messages, media etc. There's no way Google is going to be able to index those on Facebook. Tell me if I'm wrong.
A few things to keep in mind as well:
- Twitter search (of the public feed) is great for realtime, sentiment tracking (search on a movie the day it opens or a TV show as it airs to get real time feedback & reactions)
- Twitter search (of the public feed) is horrible for many things where relationships matter (i.e. I don't care who globally is looking to share a meal but I might care very much who, amongst my friends who are also close to me geographically - say at the same conference - want to share a meal or more usually are already planning a group meal somewhere) I'm sure you can think of dozens of other searches that are useless on the full public feed but great if you can filter them to just who you are already following
- likewise, Facebook status updates (and to a lesser degree the full public feeds on Facebook which are much more than just status) contain a lot of stuff which isn't all that search friendly - but more contextual updates & conversations (for ex are comments on status updates going to also be searchable?)
- I personally find Google's social search announcement the most intriguing - I've LONG wanted to be able to search not the public feed but to have an option to search just the feeds of my friends - of the folks (and companies) whom I have chosen to follow. Ideally including an ability to search those friend's whose status updates (say on Twitter or also on Facebook) are restricted - i.e. set private - but clearly this has technical complications and isn't possible probably via a third party search such as Google or Bing)
I also, and here is actually full disclosure a project I've been working on, very interested in NON-search filters where I can see subsets of the folks I pay attention to in interesting & useful ways (i.e. smart tools/capabilities that might let me find out important stuff from the businesses and people I follow without the a priori requirement that search has - i.e. to search for something I have to know that it exists and figure out a way to search for it)
interesting times indeed
Shannon, I agree that the "search inside my friends' updates across multiple social networks" announcement is the hotness. Unfortunately, everyone's on Facebook.
Marshall,
A related point I meant to make but my comment was already too long - I also don't always care about ALL of my friends for every type of search.
i.e. in my example of seeing who else is in near realtime looking to do something (say grab dinner after a conference) there are folks whom I would grab dinner with - and others who though I respect them/follow for other reasons I might not want to share a meal with
Groups is how I, badly, solve this (via Tweetdeck etc).
I'm also curious what, if anything, the impact of lists will be to services that use whom we are FOLLOWING to derive behavior - i.e. if I follow someone else's list am I set as following each of the individuals on that twitter list? (or just the list as a whole? In either case is that list included in some manner when a third party (such as Google or Bing if they use our twitter follow/followers data) does search?
Shannon
Remember that garden walls eventually come down. Think CompuServe, AOL, even the Berlin Wall! The Microsoft-Facebook announcement seems like the first crack in that wall.
Most Facebook users want "privacy" (there's the reciprocity thing, remember) and keep their content non-public. Most Twitter users want connections and keep their content public (ie, not protected). I think it will be more difficult to convince Facebook folks to "open up" than Twitter folks to update their Google profile, if by updating the profile they'll get better (more contextual, more meaningful) search results.
Finally, a reminder that we don't want to *search* we want to *find*. Eventually, we'll have intelligent bots helping us find information and they'll do that in a variety of ways. Until then, we get to watch the wars and hope the good guy wins.
I did write something much like this on my Posterous, informally of course: http://post.ly/9cfp
I've been using Greasemonkey for a while with my Google/FireFox and it's interesting and often useful, sometimes not.
I'm curious to know how probing "organic" conversations gives Bing/Google access to the Deep Web that the search engines don't ordinarily pick up.
I'm also 'concerned' that Twitter will look less relevant if Facebook "real-time" results dwarf Twitter results due to lack of people/relevance.
Mark, see my comment above yours. I don't believe that most Facebook folks are going to want to make their status updates public any time soon, so I'm not "worried" that somehow Facebook will appear more "relevant" at least in the short term.
"...Unfortunately, everyone's on Facebook."
I'm not!
"...but everyone's on facebook"... isn't that a little status centric? are status updates really what people want to be searching? imho, no. i think if you are searching your friends feeds it probably has more to do with what restaurants are good in a certain area, what movies to watch, what books to read, etc. oh... and what articles are people reading today, and what videos are they watching (mostly on youtube).
so "everyone" may be on facebook, but tons of people are also on yelp, netflix, youtube, and so on (hey, when's amazon going to start adding social functions). when you sign up for a google profile, if you add a link or two it will use the social graph api to look for other links of yours, and it does a really good job of finding them.
facebooks biggest hope is getting more site (and thus user) to use facebook connect, but the irony there is that if they are successful with that, it only helps to grow the amount of content that users are generating on *other non-facebook sites* that google can then index, and let you search through you social links.
facebook needs users to feed facebook by facebook connect. google needs users to feed the internet and fill out a google profile. call me crazy, but i'd still bet on the latter.
Marshall, I guess it's all about how you define what social search is :)
The "Social Search" that Google's talking about launching soon, that's just refining the web results to give a bump to content written by those in your social network. I've seen it, and it's pretty cool.
Then there's Social Search in reshaping results based on what your friends are doing. Harder for many reasons.
Then there's Social Search / "Real Time Search" which means searching through microblogged content. Agreed -- getting Facebook is important. But Twitter's half the battle fought now.
As you said, the biggest challenge is probably just that lots of people on Facebook don't put there stuff out by default to the public. Facebook can't sell what it's not allowed to sell, and there's a lot of work to get people to change those defaults.
That's a safe assumption. It'll be interesting to see google and bing compete for "social search" supremacy.
google is great. I am always waiting for its new ideas
My Google profile has extracted a lot of information about the sites I use by parsing my FOAF and XFN data from my site. Is the social search going to look at each of those sites and work out who my contacts are? I'd prefer it if it looked at my FOAF and/or XFN contacts and looked at their sites, but that requires that they also use that sort of metadata. It would give me more control over who was included in the search. It would also allow people who don't use social sites themselves to get social search data.
I've been following the progress of FOAF for a few years and hoped it would make it to the mainstream, but that has yet to happen. A few social sites do support it. Perhaps Google's social search will give it a boost.
I hope this doesn't slow the indexing of traditional web content.
I'm not sure why I would want to search tweets anyway.
I think that this could be a "predictably irrational" event, that could change many things. Social networks could stop growing when people feel spammed. Spam fighting enterprises and Social media consultants should be happy today.
I get the feeling Facebook and Twitter are classed as sort of the same social network in this article. (As a battle for the social networks at least.) This is the wrong way to look at it imho. Communication on Facebook is between friends, relatives, known people and that's where FB stresses on too. On Twitter, it's between the world, unless you opt out of that.
When making decisions like this, I'd hope Google/Microsoft at least consider the type of information and public the network attracts..
To reply to Adrian,
I do not consider most of my interactions on Facebook to be all that different from my interactions on Twitter. I've set my profile to be as public as I can, with the exception of private messages (on either service) my assumption is that everything I do on Facebook is public and available via search (albeit at the moment the fairly limited and not all that useful Facebook search for the most part)
In fact as a general rule I prefer to operate in public, on the record and via means which are archiveable and searchable. Yes, I use email (though again I mostly assume that any email I send to more than one person is fairly public - and even private emails can certainly be forwarded with ease) and I do use DM's on occasion. On Facebook the one "private" action I take with some frequency is around planning events - if the event is held at my own home (a dinner party or brunch) I typically set that event private and control the invite lists. But that's the exception.
Twitter isn't primarily about communication - that's part of it, but it is equally (perhaps more for many) about public sharing - of updates, of thoughts, of links, of actions or questions. Some gestures can, at times, inspire communications & interactions - but many others do not or do not at least immediately. But they are of value and often of interest to the folks who follow someone (if not then people would often stop following that Twitter account)
I don't know many individuals who would want their status updates shared publicly. But a lot of companies with facebook pages would. Maybe Facebook will give users the option of allowing certain status updates to be public and others private. If that were the case, people may choose to share some with the world. Right now your privacy setting applies to all status updates.
Hi,
My vote is with Google. Long live Google.
Hi, Seen this new site have done research in googlelivesearch.com ........ anyway you will prob no more than me - is
http://www.friendfeed.com-so-you-think-you-can-dance
the new "Google Twitter" october 2009.
"It's going to be a wild ride and big moves are being made right now."
Well, maybe. But at this time, I don't see any prospect of Google "checkmating" Microsoft or vice versa. *The consumer is the one getting checkmated!* Microsoft and Google are spending (m|b)illions on "projects" with little potential to make most peoples' lives better in any practical way. In the current economy, it discouages me to see such waste, and I think both companies have some core issues that aren't being addressed because they are chasing "sexy" things like real-time and social search.
I've needed a good aggregator of content from the social networks in which I and my 'friends' are active. FriendFeed isn't it. User acceptance would depend on how well users can set complex filters.
It would be really, REALLY interesting to compare the product roadmaps and feature lists for this application from Goog, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter...
Calling all analysts, experts and other folk who have access to good information: please build some scenarios!
--Maria
I have maybe 6,000 "friends" on Twitter. Do I really care about each and every one of them?
I have less than 150 friends on Facebook. Do I really want to know what each of them had for breakfast?
Search is what you do when you have a morass of information you are trying to find something in ("I wonder if anyone I "know" had bacon this morning and immediately broke out in a purple rash...")
Conversation is something else, you might not need to be a friend, but an off topic loudmouth cannot be included in a useful conversation.
Actual friends is yet another category.
And there are more ways to slice it yet of course, but search is for a domain that is the least interesting.
cheers
I think google and twitter are coming very fast. They are strong competitors for facebook.
The social search space is in major flux.