I read a very interesting article on All facebook about pages from the internet now starting to appear in searches within Facebook.  The example given is displayed below:

You can see from the image displayed the second result of a page search is a page not on Facebook.  It was a page that is on trip advisor that has a ‘like’ button beside it that people clicked on 5 times.  This is part of what Facebook calls the open graph.  They are allowing people to like pages over the internet and now they are starting to appear in search results.

This like functionality will get deployed throughout the internet and as search gets better in Facebook a lot of people will never need to use Google search again.  So will Facebook topple Google over time?  There’s absolutely a big possibility this will happen.  So which is better, Google thrawling through content and getting computers decide which content is more important or indexing content based on real humans deciding if they like the content or not?  This user approach to indexing is similar to social booking marking (delicious, diigo etc) where users decide which content they ‘like’.

I’ll be watching this exciting space very closely as it’s going to be interesting to see what Google and Facebook’s next moves are but certainly the war has begun, there will be one winner who will dominate.  I’d prefer to be sitting in Facebook’s corner.  A people powered search is always going to beat a computer powered one.

Who do you think will be the winner in this battle?