I wonder what would happen if google dropped facebook from their search results in retaliation. At least for tech-savvy users it won't pose a problem, but for the rest it will cause major problems (e.g. the RWW article).
Will it be legal though?
Edit: Seriously. Tweaking your search algorithms to the detriment of some providers and to the benefit of others is one thing (that Google does now, and which they won't be sued for). Deliberately removing a direct competitor with as high a profile (and deep pockets) as Facebook is a different kettle of fish.
Google owns 84% of the search market globally (http://marketshare.hitslink.com/search-engine-market-share.a...). That is considered a monopoly as far as Anti-Trust laws are concerned.
I realize Google couldn't ban Facebook, and that they'd be sued for that, but I do find it funny that the opposite is completely okay. Is Facebook not trying to become a monopoly ad provider on its own site?
Google is a search site and purports to have close to every publicly available(i.e not banned in robots.txt) page indexed. Delisting a very popular site(will be doing that for the first time) will get it into the news for the wrong reasons. And how much will it hurt Facebook? Barely. How many people signup for Facebook that searched "Best social networking site" ? It will actually hurt them monetarily so it will be hard to sell to stockholders. I see almost zero chance of this happening.
On the other hand, Facebook's value is not in showing ads, it's about social networking. How will removing Google ads hurt it? Will it kill off enough FB applications for people to take notice and leave FB for... what? Orkut? Google Go? Myspace?
After all, the FB applications use Facebook's resources, so they want to indirectly charge them for it while making money.
Historically, Yahoo trumped itself as having the best search results thanks to human curation of its search directory. Bing, even today, labels itself as a "decision engine".
Google as far as I know has no public statements implying that there's a 1:1 correspondence between the set of possible Google results for all queries and the internet. This relationship is far more important than merely a 1:1 between index and internet.
Ok, I can understand that. So, what if all results from *.facebook.com were moved after the first few pages of google's results for the relevant search terms?
Would that be enough for an antitrust lawsuit?
As for the target group of users we are discussing, it would have virtually the same results.
Similarly in the mobile space, even though Google is in head-on competition with Apple, they still develop iphone-optimized versions of their apps. That's just good business.
Just the same way Microsoft won't make Google/Apple products not work on Windows.
Facebook, on the other hand, is based on the users voluntarily and involuntarily (through friends etc) providing their information and isn't so discreet about it's attempts to leverage this data to profit.
This is known even by non savvy users (personally, I've met a lot of non technical people that were worried about Facebook's collection of data with regards to personal rights/privacy, but haven't once heard about Google's tactics) and has bitten them before, e.g. Beacon.
So I feel that Google won't be stigmatized by such a move, considering it's against an opponent perceived by the public as more evil.