Facebook vs. Google
Life in the digital world moves quickly. Last week Page and Brin’s [Google founders] crown passed to a 26-year-old rival who has every intention of keeping it.
But for how long?
The Threat
First there was Microsoft. Microsoft didn’t ‘get’ the internet (may be hastened by legal action – remember Netscape?) and chose to dismiss Google ‘as an arrogant upstart’. Microsoft is now playing catch-up but it is too little and too late. The bus has gone….
Then there was Google. Google now faces the challenge of another idea whose time has come. Google has tried to responding by incorporating more social media content on its pages
Facebook, set up by Mark Zuckerberg, is getting more traffic than Google in the US. The big impact is that Facebook is the first major competitor to come close to challenging Google since Google became dominant.
Facebook’s growing stats
Number of active users:
World |
427 million |
US |
280 million |
UK |
24 million |
Other data:
50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans
Facebook: the depositor of information
Facebook users share everything from photos, jokes, to film reviews, restaurant and holiday recommendations. Discovery” is the buzzword in social media — that feeling of finding something that’s been recommended by people you trust. Now Facebook has the critical mass to make discovery a viable alternative to conventional search engines.
All this data that people are sharing potentially allows social networks to gather this information and use it in interesting ways. For example, when you are looking for a movie recommendation, what you want to know is what people like you think. A bunch of kids who rate Twilight with five stars is no use to me. What about middle-aged men who have shown an interest in art films? What are they watching?”
Is this the end of the road for Google?
The most frightening statistic for Google is Facebook’s astonishing growth. Visits to the site have risen 185% over the past year. During the same period, Google’s traffic only rose by 9%.
But don't write Google off just yet….
Factor 1: Google has been diversifying:
That takes Google into head-on competition with Microsoft and Apple, as well as all the mobile phone manufacturers.
Factor 2: Google search:
Google’s algorithms have ordered the chaos of the internet with mathematical exactitude and become the default method for finding things online. There will still be a need for this. Facebook and social media sites do not provide the same facility but satisfy a different set of needs.
Factor 3: Comparing like with like:
A closer look at the numbers shows that Facebook has a long way to go before it can be said to be ahead of Google in any real sense.
Facebook vs Google: comparing like with like
Google’s diversification attempts have to be added to the results. That includes:
Nielsen, the analyst, has a different take on the rise of Facebook to Hitwise. By its measurements, Facebook is the third most visited site on the planet with 2.5 billion hits in February compared with Yahoo’s 2.7 billion and Google’s 3 billion. We think this is a radical underestimate of Google’s search volume and that I could be as high as 3 billion searches a day or around 300-500 million visits a day.
One would expect users to spend longer the amount of time spent on Facebook - it is a different experience. It is more about communicating than a search.
In Google, the less time people spend on Google search the better for the firm. It’s about speed. People want to plug in their query, get the results and move on. Google has won its huge following by being the best at that. But if search migrates away from Google, and Facebook starts eating up time spent on YouTube, Gmail or Google Maps, the search giant has a problem.
ODDLY, as Facebook gets bigger, the internet is looking smaller. Facebook and Google (with YouTube, and Gmail) now account for more than 17% of internet activity — nearly one web visit in every five. The runners up are losing ground, leaving the possibility of a world where Google and Facebook slug it out as the Coke and Pepsi of the internet universe: both sides battling for the title ‘The Real Thing’.
Source: The Sunday Times, March 21, 2010, Dominic Rushe
Copyright AFS Search Engine Marketing © 2009.