Facebook are about to enter Search.
And nobody is better placed to take on the might of Google.
Investors are nodding their heads too, giving it a thumbs up by rocketing the share price. Revenues from search, could well compensate Facebook's problems on mobile and give them a whole new Ad frontier. It's big business and perfect for Facebook.
At the moment, Facebook search is about finding people and frankly, a very poor effort, allowing you to find names only. So if you search a common name - John Smith - you'll end up with millions of results and no real way to refine them. So the engine is poor....at the moment.
However, clearly Facebook has great content. So imagine that perhaps you'd like to find a car/city/hotel which your friends like? Or a brand on Facebook your colleagues like? Anybody I know work for a company I'm about to join? and so on.
Using "likes" it can bring search into relevance by giving me results which like-minded people might suggest and recommend. In other words, not just a list of good restaurants, or indeed a list of 5 star restaurants, but rather, restaurants that my friends like and therefore I might too. Relevance.
Google returns about 3 billion searches a day. Facebook returns about 1 billion, without "even trying" says The Zuck.
"Search is interesting. We do on the order of 1 billion queries a day and we’re basically not even trying. Today with search the vast majority of it is people trying to find people, but there’s also a meaningful portion of queries where people are trying to find Pages, brand Pages, other business Pages — so there’s a bunch of that that actually does link to commercial behaviour, and I think there’s a big opportunity there and we just need to go do that." Mark Zuckerberg last Tuesday.
The betting at the moment is that Facebook Search will not be a standalone but rather incorporated better onto Facebook pages where it will live, and which makes total sense. It's an easy integration and an even easier marketing job.
In June, it already renamed its Search box from just "Search" to "Search for people, places and things", a sign of what's to come.
Facebook has a lot of work to do but it has the cash and this provides a good solution to its never ending saga of generating more revenue. It's surely a winner.
In July, Techcrunch reported that Facebook had already started to test "sponsored results" allowing advertisers access on a ppc (pay per click) basis.
And now with Zuckerbergs comments, where as an IPO floated company he has to be real careful, we know it's coming.
Early adopters please note.
It's going to be a real opportunity for brands.
Actually when you spell check 'Zuckerberg' you get 'Knickerbockers'.
Interesting start.
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