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Comment by brg | Hacker News Reader

Entering the search market would require hundreds of employees and a significant upfront capital expenditure. Without going public, I don't think there is any question--they will not enter search.

If they go public, then it depends on the opportunity costs. Is there a better place for ~5Billion dollar investment? Probably yes. Two things come to mind; an ad distribution network and a 'social' browser.

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Facebook don't need to take on the huge capital cost of launching a search engine. They can take advantage of the fact that Microsoft already did.

Facebook can enter the search market by deepening the connection between its data and Bing's technology, and then making some UI changes.

Um, and if they do that, who takes the profits from the search engine? Microsoft, who has "invested" billions and billions of dollars and who would presumably like to recoup some or all of their losses, or Facebook? And if that's the case, how much value does that add to Facebook again? It's an interesting and open question, but methinks predictions that Facebook would get all of the profits, when Microsoft has put in the all or most of the capital costs of a money-losing search engine system, seem to be a little hard to believe, don't you think? And that's of course assuming Microsoft can be successful in search, which has yet to be seen at least from a business perspective...

I didn't claim that Facebook would take all the profits in such a scenario. Of course Microsoft would have a valid claim to some profits from a joint venture, the two companies would strike a deal over the exact split. As has been noted in other threads, though, even a small share of the search market can be worth a lot.

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