Facebook’s blog today revealed the latest attack in the Facebook vs. Google battle. Facebook have joined forces with Microsoft’s search engine Bing to make searching “more social” and take a significant amount of users away from the power-house search engine Google.
Facebook’s blog makes a point of how significant our friends’ preferences and opinions are to our own choices, and the new partnership with Bing aims to give you exactly that with regard to whatever you’re searching for. For example, if I were to search ‘the Expendables’ on Bing, I could see how many of my facebook friends liked the film, which is supposed to help me make the decision on whether or not I will watch the film or influence my own opinion on the film.
The concept basically evolves from Facebook’s agenda to recommend you things, whether it is a film, cafe, restaurant or another person, whatever your friends like or whoever your friends are connected to will show up at the top of your search list.
As far as the Facebook vs. Google battle goes, the new partnership with Bing aims to encourage people to use Bing rather than Google as their primary search engine online. Bing has a significantly fewer users than Google but considering the population of Facebook, the new social search feature could see Bing become a significant threat to Google.
Of course, Google won't be taking this lying down. After the failure of Google Wave earlier this year, Google have been working on another social networking site to compete with Facebook titled Google Me.
While Facebook and Google continue competing for the internet, I do wonder what effect something like social searching will have on social interactions in real life. Will we have less to actually talk about when Facebook is doing it all for us, and will the quality of a friends opinion become irrelevant in favour of the quantity of friends liking something?
Call me ancient, but I remember a time when if you wanted to recommend something to someone, you picked up the phone or had a chat to them in the street. I don't want people to see what I've been searching for! Especially on those late nights when I'm all alone in a darkened room... *ahem*
ReplyDeleteIt seems dreadfully ironic that in order to make us more social, we're using more of this "social networking" technology.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it shows people what you've searched for, just what you've 'liked' on Facebook.
ReplyDeleteI do agree with you though. I'm slightly worried about what will happen to actual person-to-person communication when social networking technology seems to be developing to keep us at arms length with one another.