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Comment by risotto | Hacker News Reader

They're gonna take over the web with a toolbar and checkins? Nope.

Compare to Google's web browser, phone platform (Android and Google Voice), operating systems, web platform (App Engine), app marketplaces and fiber.

I like Facebook and depend on it. They will happily be a top destination on the web for a long time to come if they keep doing what they are doing: run a pleasant, useful and fun website for keeping in touch with people.

But Facebook is a web app, Google is a technology empire. There's no comparison right now. Twitter and Yelp should be scared, but not Google.

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While I agree that Twitter / Yelp should be scared (very...very scared,) you forget that Google makes little to no money on all of those things you mention. They are a search company. Facebook stands to be a giant threat to their search business.

It's getting a bit boring to say it, but Google is not a search company. They provide search to sell ads (doesn't matter how they started out), so while I agree with the threat conclusion, I doubt Facebook will create the next general purpose search engine.

It's not a war for search. It's a war for user attention.

Per Alexa, the average FB user spends 30+ mins on FB each day; the average GOOG user spends <10 mins on GOOG. And FB has far more extensive info about each user.

I think the risks to GOOG are generally underestimated. It's going to be a great stock to short within the next 3 years.

It's going to be a great stock to short within the next 3 years.

But then what isn't?

google should most definitely be scared. they make something like 90% of their profit from advertising - advertising based on your search query or the context of the page you're reading. facebook's ad platform has the potential to destory them, given they know your so much more about you, your friends, interests etc.

is it hard for facebook to launch a search engine, with rankings tweaked via the social graph? not really.

is it hard for google to catch up with fb's graph? yes very, but they're trying.

The difference is the last mile. Google's ads target someone looking for something (which is much more likely to result in a sale) whereas facebook's ads target someone looking to check out his friend's pics from last night's party or the profile of a girl he met recently.

Vastly different contexts.

Maybe, in the future, facebook will be able to change this, but it's doubtful. At least not on the facebook.com property. There's a very good reason why social network CPMs are consistently the lowest in the entire industry.

> There's a very good reason why social network CPMs are consistently the lowest in the entire industry.

That's the whole point of the article in my view - Facebook is looking for ways to increase that CPM. If they can do that then they would stand a chance of 'taking over the web'. Yes they probably would have find a way to 'target someone looking for something'. I would estimate that the average user of Facebook is more naive and influence-able in their purchasing than the average Google user which could be a useful advantage.

>google should most definitely be scared. they make something like 90% of their profit from advertising - advertising based on your search query or the context of the page you're reading. facebook's ad platform has the potential to destory them, given they know your so much more about you, your friends, interests etc.

I suspect that your query stream is much richer data than everything you've ever done on facebook.

>is it hard for facebook to launch a search engine, with rankings tweaked via the social graph? not really.

This is dramatically underestimating the difficulty of search. Ranking sites by quality is not hard (in the head at least), and facebook can certainly tweak that well with social data. Ranking pages by relevance to a query is extremely hard.

Google can take the approximation of the social graph that they have (in Gmail & Orkut) and improve search results based on that. I doubt they haven't at least tried to estimate how much does this help.

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