Social Search - Google and Facebook up for a fight

Home » Social Media » Social Search – The Train is coming…

Feb 2011

train Over the last few days Google made a significant change to it’s search algorithm. If you are now logged in to Google and perform a search it will give a strong weighting in search results to content provided by or linked to by your friends in your social graph. This could be people on Twitter, Flickr, through blogs and other public sources of data. This personalisation of search results is a trend that is set to continue. It’s about providing search results that are more relevant to you.

RottenTomatoes is a movie review site. Recently they integrated their data with Facebook so now when you look up movie reviews it pulls information from your social graph to display more relevant results. If some of my friends rated movies that I’m searching for I start to see this information. I also see other activity on the site related to my friends. Google is taking this a step further back by personalising results directly from search.

There is only one big problem for Google and that’s the new kid on the block – Facebook. How can you implement a real social search when you don’t have access to all the conversation from the 650 million people within Facebook. This is a big hole in Google’s strategy which they cannot resolve as there’s no way Facebook will ever give them access to this.

However, Facebook do have access to all the public sites that Google has so a social search within Facebook is always going to be more powerful. At the moment the search facility within Facebook is very basic. When you search it displays results from internally within Facebook, from Bing and it is also starting to deliver results from websites sites that are tightly integrated with Facebook. Watch this area expand and grow.

If you asked anybody in Facebook what they think about how good Google’s search is they are likely to completely disagree with how this search is implemented. Google’s machines index all the content and the search results are heavily influenced by Linking from external sites. However, Facebook believes in people indexing content not machines. On Facebook if someone clicks ‘Like’ on a piece of content or ‘Recommend’ that’s an extra vote for this piece of content. Of course if they click ‘Like’ Facebook also has access to information on who this person is, who are their friends, how influential they are etc and this could all be taken into account. The ‘Like’ button is a simple but very important steps towards social search. Watch out for Facebook over the next few months delivering a major upgrade to their search which will get people really thinking about Google’s number 1 position and how it is not guaranteed any more!

Have you noticed changes in search results recently?

(Picture credit)

http://www.cubeonlinemarketing.ie/ Leslie

Yes, Google have always had problem with the social side and have had a few attempts at building something to challenge Facebook – anyone remember Buzz?
http://www.cubeonlinemarketing.ie/ Leslie

Yes, Google have always had problem with the social side and have had a few attempts at building something to challenge Facebook – anyone remember Buzz?
http://www.hal9000.ie Jennie Molphy

Really interesting Ian. nFacebook is really poor for search – in fact pretty poor for finding anything – and then it all moves around again like a bad dream!.nThe upgrade to Pages to allow an admin be logged in as that Page was a huge improvement and was overdue – Facebook has become such an important marketing channel for business.nThey have the audience, they have access to the ‘conversation’, but will they focus on search now ?? Does seem logical.nSo how does the SEO optimise for ‘Like’ building? Back to the core principles of good content I guess, but the plot thickens…nn(PS. Enjoyed your sessions at the DMI Post-Grad)
http://www.hal9000.ie Jennie

Really interesting Ian.
Facebook is really poor for search – in fact pretty poor for finding anything – and then it all moves around again like a bad dream!.
The upgrade to Pages to allow an admin be logged in as that Page was a huge improvement and was overdue – Facebook has become such an important marketing channel for business.
They have the audience, they have access to the 'conversation', but will they focus on search now ?? Does seem logical.
So how does the SEO optimise for 'Like' building? Back to the core principles of good content I guess, but the plot thickens…

(PS. Enjoyed your sessions at the DMI Post-Grad)
Anonymous

Thanks Jennie!nnYou’re right about Facebook being poor for search, they have a long list of features and search is low on the list at the moment. Their real focus is making sure they own every interaction with a good piece of content on the web. They already own this on Facebook but you might have seen that they have just launched a much improved comments system. You can now add their comments system to a blog and when someone comments this gets shared on facebook. If somebody sees this on facebook they can comment on it and then it gets shared out on the blog! I think the ‘Like’ button is powerful but it’s not enough to index your content so it will be interesting to see what else they introduce.
Anonymous

Google buzz, what’s that
iancleary

Thanks Jennie!

You're right about Facebook being poor for search, they have a long list of features and search is low on the list at the moment. Their real focus is making sure they own every interaction with a good piece of content on the web. They already own this on Facebook but you might have seen that they have just launched a much improved comments system. You can now add their comments system to a blog and when someone comments this gets shared on facebook. If somebody sees this on facebook they can comment on it and then it gets shared out on the blog! I think the 'Like' button is powerful but it's not enough to index your content so it will be interesting to see what else they introduce.
iancleary

Google buzz, what's that