Hacker News Reader

Comment by CodingGuy | Hacker News Reader

If Google Trends is somewhat right, we've definitely reached peak Facebook: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook

View on HN

This is likely more indicative of society:

A. Becoming more computer-literate and going straight to sites as opposed to always Googling it before clicking, even once familiar with the URL, which won't correlate to usage

B. Visiting the site enough for AutoFill to take effect, which is ever-so-slightly inverse in correlation in terms of search popularity to site popularity

Here's a FB-related search term people will still use, even with AutoFill for Facebook, as some evidence. The rise is a similar pattern, but lacking the major drop: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook...

Agree. Another factor is mobile usage. The % of users that use Facebook _exclusively_ as an app is likely trending up as well.

[facebook] was the most common search query when I was at Google (roughly the period covered by this graph), and [facebook login] would alternate between #2 and #3. Neither of your options seem likely at all to me - over the time I was there, I witnessed people becoming more likely to navigate to sites via Googling them rather than clicking, not less. The trend is even more pronounced with mobile, where basically nobody types in a URL, they use voice search and speak the name of the site.

I would bet on the Facebook mobile app being a major cause, though. Instead of hitting the web version at all, they're opening the mobile app.

I agree with this... also the rise of predictive searching in browsers and the omnibar etc.

Also, why would you search for facebook anymore since everyone knows facebook.com site at this point.

Because search is the new navigation, whether you like it or not.

Yep, it's the new navigation because of search noted above and because of typo squatters with malware.

Not on mobile. Not to launch an app.

I never type in URLs directly. It is either a single click on the menu bar/blank tab, or else I go via a search engine to reduce the risk of landing on a typo squatter.

I've seen several ads on TV and billboards which just say "Search for $brandname $productname" instead of a URL.

Do people really voice search for things like that? Aside from drivers going hands-free, I have never seen a colleague or friend use voice commands where it wasn't just for the novelty.

I do, and I've heard a bunch of my friends do it. On Android voice recognition is both fairly reliable and really easy, so why not?

Yeah it absolutely is reliable and easy. I just haven't seen it catch on among my circles. Interesting.

IME, the first people in my friend group who started doing it were the ones who weren't insecure about looking "uncool" (so a combination of unapologetic techies and people without low self-esteem). Afaict, that's the main reason that people don't use a feature that would otherwise save tons of time.

I'm not afraid of being seen as an uncool geeky, but I would never use it as I don't like to broadcast what I am looking for to all my neighbors, even when I am alone I prefer silence, typing now requires basically the same amount of time.

Yes, I like voice search.

I still won't use "OK Google", because it's the new Bluetooth headset, only douchebags use it in public. Come on Google, how much do you lose by allowing custom phrases?

More than one would be good, but it's probably hard to explain to layman how to choose a phrase for which they can create an accurate model that's so cheap it can run continuously.

I use voice search all the time, even in a desktop. It's much faster than typing.

Also consider that people are less likely to use voice search if they are around others. So that might explain why you haven't seen friends/colleagues do it.

80% of facebooks revenue comes from mobile, so i wouldnt be surprised if that contributed a lot.

however, i dont see how facebook being #2 and #3 among searches means anything against the fact that most people either dont close facebook or as soon as they type 'f' facebook.com is autocomplete. unless you get to see how many autocompleted hits they are getting, you are experiencing a selection bias

Was that also the case with people googling google.com? https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=google.com

With the native iOS app being released in 2012, the timeline would be perfect for that, yeah.

Does the mobile app take away that much usage from the web? I can see how it'll increase overall usage as people will use FB when they otherwise couldn't, but I imagine anyone who could be using it on a computer will still use the web version over a mobile app (web seems more functional, especially so with the recent Facebook/Messenger division).

A lot of workplace usage has shifted to mobile. Many workplaces will monitor all your Internet usage, and so once mobile became available, many people decided that rather than letting their employers know how much time they waste during the day, they'd use their own private Internet connection for that.

We saw a similar effect at Google with porn queries, particularly during the day. As soon as image search came to mobile Google, many porn queries moved to mobile; as of 2013 porn queries were twice as likely on mobile search as desktop.

If this were true, we'd see similar drops in other popular sites like Amazon and Apple and Google itself.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook...

This shows the underlying utility of Facebook compared to other tech giants distilled in to a really generic scenario.

- You go to Google to research what to buy.

- You go to Amazon to give Amazon your hard earned money.

- You go to Facebook to brag what you bought.

Yet the market cap of Facebook rivals those two with far less revenue and highest multiplier.

This cannot last.

In theory the reason for this is that Facebook is "stickier" than Google or Amazon. If Google search isn't working for you, you can switch to something else in a heartbeat. If Facebook isn't working for you, you have to get all your friends to switch to something else before you can.

The problem is this is also going to be Facebook's downfall at some indeterminate future date. Because if some other social network ever becomes more popular than Facebook, Facebook is over.

Most people can't switch from google to something else in a heartbeat...

we can email our friends, text them or meet them in the bar though.

I cannot email my friends

I'm relatively tech savvy, but I'm not sure my significant other would know where to go if Google was down. DDG or even Bing are not top of mind. What else is there?

bing is actually pretty good. sometimes google's selection bias to what it knows about me prevents me from getting to the results I want so i either search in incognito mode or search in bing.

Not that it matters.

I can't be the only one who uses `httping www.google.com` to check if the internet is up?

There's precedent for this: MySpace.

It wasn't a social network though.

In Germany only bands add musicians used it.

No social pressure to stay at MySpace.

It was a social network; just an inferior one to Facebook. They lost to Facebook because Facebook was a more pleasant site for social networking, which made it more popular.

If you were in Germany, you may not have seen this, because MySpace didn't enter Germany until 2006 or 2007. At that point, Facebook was already starting to beat them with new users. By 2008, the established user base of MySpace was fleeing in droves to Facebook. The network effects that would have created social pressure to stay actually caused it to collapse even faster.

There is nothing that would prevent this exact thing from happening to Facebook. If a better site were to come along (or if Facebook were to become vastly less competitive than they are now), the social pressure could actually cause them to collapse just as fast as MySpace did.

if some other social network ever becomes more popular

This is why Facebook buys out anything new that looks like it might threaten Facebook's dominance.

In fact it can last. Your information is wrong.

Amazon has a radically higher multiple than Facebook. About six times higher, being charitable with Amazon's flaky net income.

Facebook will hit $13 or $14 billion in net income for fiscal 2017. Explain to me how a 27 or 28 pe ratio is unsupportable when you're growing net income at 30% or higher.

Meanwhile Google is growing its net income at 18% with a PE of 30. A far more lopsided ratio than Facebook has now, and one that is going to get much worse in just the next four quarters.

So you're wrong on both counts. Facebook has the superior value proposition based on valuation to net income + factoring growth rate.

please provide souces

I knew those people where out there, but there are almost as many people googling "google" as "youtube". Why? How many just want to get to google, and how many or doing something intelligent?

I used to think this was dumb as well, until I realized that if you type "google" into the address bar of Chrome, Firefox, or Safari (possibly IE too, I haven't used it since IE6), it runs a Google search. Nobody ever bothers with the .com anymore; why should they, when just typing the name of the site in will get to it? So a sizable number of people who go to Google Search get there by running a Google Search.

Also, a surprisingly large fraction of users cannot touch-type. They've been trained to go to Google to search, so they type in g-o-o-g-l-e-ENTER and get where they intended, and never notice the autocomplete suggestions showing up in the Omnibox or the fact that they could just type their whole query in and get answers.

According to Google Trends we reached "peak Google" in 2013:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Google

What's actually happened is that fewer people are using search engines as their app launcher, because they are using the smartphone home screen instead.

No comparable web properties have the dropoff that Facebook has (twitter, eBay, craigslist, even Yahoo which seems to be fading faster into irrelevance by the day).

Isn't that a plot of people who search Google for the term "google"? If so, I imagine it's something people who are familiar with computers and the internet do not do often.

Maybe Google did peak and now people are treating search engines as some white-label service that they're utterly indifferent to the provider of.

That graph looks scary for Facebook. Yet the share prices have not corrected to reflect it.

1 Tunisia 100

2 Turkey 95

3 Venezuela 95

4 Ecuador 87

5 Peru 86

6 Algeria 84

7 El Salvador 81

8 Serbia 77

9 Colombia 75

10 Dominican Republic

Notice that none of the developed economies are showing up in the top 10. The dollar per user must be falling as users are increasingly coming from smaller economies which means less amount of ad revenue dollars.

It makes sense why Zuckerberg is crazy for China. Without another spurt of user base growth, Facebook's share price will not be sustainable.

Mobile, mobile, mobile. In 2010 everybody would hit Facebook multiple times a day from their workplace. In 2017 nobody in the developed world uses their work computer to access Facebook, they pop open the Facebook app on their phone or have it open 24/7 on their home computer. The people left doing the Google -> Facebook routine are those in developing countries who either don't have mobile phones or don't have app-capable mobile phones.

"are those in developing countries who either don't have mobile phones or don't have app-capable mobile phones."

As far as I know, they rather have a cheap smartphone, than a PC ...

If they could make an official Facebook app less resource hogging, more user-friendly and usable on older mobile phones, they would be back in the game. But their app is probably the worst app you can have on your phone. It's terrible, slow and a joke. I would expect such an app from Verizon or GoDaddy, not from Facebook.

https://mbasic.facebook.com

Not an app, it's a solution for some. Their official app sucks.

They have already had this for over a year, it's called Facebook Lite.

It's not main app, its secondary.

There is no sign of average revenue per user decreasing. Even in US & Canada, ARPU increased from $13.7 in Q4 2015 to $19.81 in Q4 2016 [1].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/01/facebook-q4-2016-earnings/

That is due to the mobile usage eating into desktop's. Zuckerberg realized it long before us and hence the whatsapp & Instagram acquisitions.

As an aside, I added Twitter to that for a sense of scale: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook... (Short version: Facebook dwarfs Twitter.)

However, the "Interest by region" is amusingly topical.

Princeton researchers used the same flawed methodology: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/22/facebook-...

This might be the phenomenon by which ubiquitous things become part of the setting rather than the focus/subject.

I've seen the point made with the railroad, and with the internet.

If you look at other tech terms, they are all "declining":

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=mobile,c...

Nope, not even close. That just shows that people started accessing Facebook through Smartphone apps, where the decline starts is where mobile use exploded.

so funny, May 2012 = 100, now = 37. yet over that time frame FB claims to have doubled their monthly active user numbers. something does not add up.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

More like it's become ubiquitous.

super interesting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com