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Comment by vthallam | Hacker News Reader

This is really a big thing since it directly affects the Google cash cow(Adwords/Doubleclick). Facebook has all the data in the world about a user(location, personal details, current mood) which google lacks and so they can target users on the rest of the internet in a better way.

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Google has internet searches. As well as often locations and journeys (Maps; Android). What a user watches (YouTube). Their emails (Gmail). What they do online (Analytics).

Facebook knows personal details, mood, etc for people who explicitly choose to share these things with their friends, or participate on Facebook in other ways. This may be an oversimplification, but I suspect Google is able to learn much more about a user passively than Facebook is.

Of course it'll differ for different people, but on balance I'd say Google knows _a lot more_ about me than Facebook does.

(...And they probably both know more about me than I do.)

So yes, this news may affect Google, but I disagree that Facebook has an advantage over Google when it comes to knowledge of users.

I think Facebook is probably better able to track what you do online through like buttons and other Facebook integrations than Google is through analytics.

Analytics cookie lives in a different cookie space and is really hard to join it back to search cookies; also it is probably illegal for google to do so.

It certainly isn't hard to do if a user is searching Google while logged into a google account.

Google knows more about what users intend to do based on what they search for. Facebook knows more about individual likes, activities, interests, etc. Facebook likely won't ever compete with Google's AdWords business (barring the real possibility of a new product somewhere in the future). But in display advertising, building a user profile is more valuable, as it is a much less intent based ad. It's a fact that Facebook is better at this than Google, because Facebook display performs markedly better than Google Display.

> Facebook knows personal details, mood, etc for people who explicitly choose to share these things with their friends, or participate on Facebook in other ways.

Facebook knows so, so, so much more than just this. Facebook knows about events you go to and are interested in. Facebook knows the type of content that you are most likely to click. Facebook knows what you are most interested in.

I don't know, I post primarily girls hockey stuff, but myself am interested in so much more. This probably varies per user, but my behavior on google properties probably is much more telling.

It's not just about what you post. That's only a tiny variable. It's also about what you have liked, the activities you've done in apps and other sites with data-sharing agreements, and what you click on. Demographics, interest, and personal characteristic targeting is far better on Facebook than anything you can buy on Google Display. I'm a buyer of both, and the difference is staggering.

It could hurt Google, but Google's biggest draw is their search PPC, which would not be effected outright. Google DoubleClick and extended networks will likely be effected (Adsense.) It could effect their PPC or CPM prices.

I welcome all competition, I frankly have found Google's dominance in this space to be frightening. I never understood how both Microsoft and Yahoo failed so miserably in this space. It's still possible that Facebook could fail here too, but they have more data and a huge advertising base that they can draw from. Something Microsoft and Yahoo didn't have...though they did have big advertisers, it was hard to get the SMBs, etc.

It's competition for the Google Display Network, for which there was already intense competition from many players

There is a lot of competition. But ultimately, the display ad network success relies on guessing the user's best interests which require a lot of data. And currently, Google & FB are the only ones who have it.

No, the Google Display Network doesn't let advertisers target search queries of users. If you want to access the search intent of users, you have to target the queries themselves with ads on the Google Search Network.

The Google Display Network has a lot of data because it is a large display network with lots of inventory, and it can follow cookies around the web.

I'm ignoring a couple of nuances with this answer, but it is not true that searching for something on Google will lead you to seeing ads for that thing on unrelated websites. If you click on a search result, and end up on someone's webpage, and then they add you to a remarketing list for the Google Display Network -- that's a different story, but that's independent of Google's network, because the same is true whether that website uses AdSense or a competitor.

In other words, we don't share your search queries with anyone. A nuance would be: if you click on an ad, the advertiser knows which keyword triggered their ad to show, so they can guess at the nature of your query that came before the ad click, and then they can intuit your intent. But that's not the same as your search queries, and we definitely don't let people advertise by saying "show my ads across the internet to people who search on Google for ____." So there's never search query sharing between Google Search and the Google Display Network, for a good reason: we want people to trust us when they enter queries, and if you got chased around the internet by ads related to what you were searching for, you might not search as often.

(I'm a PM on Google Search Ads, and I don't represent Google with my answer but rather giving some publicly available knowledge about how the networks work)

Google has all their internet searches

I guess to solve that Facebook needs to buy Yahoo and make it credible again.

People use Facebook to search, too. Not only standard Web search, but search with whatever context they were doing or talking about. I don't know how Google would have that data without having a widely adopted social network.

From whatever I have seen over the years (including the present moment), Facebook is light years behind Google in searching for stuff and getting all the relevant results within Facebook. I can't help but be very amused at the thought of Facebook being able to search the web well. :)

To me (and my searches on Facebook) it has always appeared that Facebook search is a crippled and neglected product. It's so bad that I save important information I see on Facebook elsewhere. Facebook is the place for the ephemeral and constantly "new" stream of stuff to keep people clicking. So it doesn't seem to have had any good reason to put competent people in search related development so far.

Yes, good points. Notice I meant people use Facebook for search. Not that people use Facebook for Web search. You can't directly search for people on google (to a degree), but you can do so in facebook (and other social networks). Point being that search is bigger than the standard web. Google is at and business disadvantage because it does not have a widely adopted social network. :)

I wouldn't underestimate Facebook's data. Friend graphs, "likes", location tagging...

They do! But as i see it, with personal details, interests, location data,mood and apps connected(FB connect), FB has a most comprehensive view of a user.

It doesn't affect Adwords for search results. That is the real cash cow that is growing each year by double digit percentages.

Doubleclick and Adsense on the other hand are starting to slow down and make up less share of Google's overall revenue [1]. In 2004 it was 50% of their revenue, now it's 20% and it's probably going to shrink even further as AdWords revenue and other revenues(cloud, apis) increase.

  > [1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/266471/distribution-of-googles-revenues-by-source/

Correct, this does not impact AdWords (save for publishers who are displaying AdWords results in AdSense modules, but that's a trivial amount of money). It does hit DoubleClick/AdSense/Google Display Network. It also hits the massive display advertising industry (most of which partner with Google for distribution). Billions of dollars are spent on display ad targeting through DMP audience segments. Facebook would instantly be the highest quality DMP on the market.

Another thing to mention is that Google reports its Network Members revenue as a gross revenue, not their cut. It would be like eBay reporting $80b in revenue, not their cut ($8b). So, Google in '14 reported $14 billion in revenue for Network Members, but 70% of that is sent to publishers. Their 'real' revenue would be around $4 billion. On the other hand, ad revenue for Google websites (search engines) was $45 billion. Google makes many times more money from its search engines than all the publishers in the world on Google Network Members combined. That's a cash cow.

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