#SocialMedia: Facebook's attempt to Disrupt Google Search

When Facebook announced the Graph Search in early 2013, Google was more threatened by Siri than it was by Zukerburg's dorm-born tool.

That's because graph search was a disappointment, providing limited search capabilities that tried to guess which types of movies I may like, for example, with results such as Home Alone.

Attempt to provide relevant search results for a 31-year old male that enjoys mystery and drama films: FAIL!

How about when we search 'Best Books of 2014' on the addictive social media site?

We get decent search results broken down by filters to improve relevancy; seems like an improvement.

Google's search results, however, were more relevant and comprehensive giving me the option to filter the movies by genre.

But the social giant is not to be ignored in the search business. Here's why:

Facebook has now matched Google's one billion monthly unique users, so things are starting to get serious.

We know the social network's 1.3 billion monthly active users is what scares Google the most, but what about its' indexed content?

Google searches 60 trillion individual pages, more than a 100 billion times a month, and stores data about those pages in its' index which is over 100,000,000 gigabytes large.

Then they rank the results using their super famous and secretive algorithm, using over 200 factors that constantly evolve in order to improve relevancy.

Now you know how the search giant can provide a great amount of rich data.



How about Facebook?

The 10-year old social network, lagging by a decade to Google, is mainly composed of posts mainly made by us and our friends, containing anything from plain text, visuals, videos and sometimes links to external pages.

But is there a sufficient amount of valuable content to feed multitudes of search queries?

In his Q4 2013 Earnings call Zuckerburg stated, "There are more than a trillion status updates and unstructured text posts and photos and pieces of content that people have shared over the past 10 years, and indexing that was a really big deal, because as the number of people on the team who have worked on web search engines in the past have told me, a trillion pieces of content is more than the index in any web search engine."

Now you know why the social king is starting to turn heads in Googleplex.

What's even more worrying to the Mountain View, California-based company, is that Facebook is now testing a feature for its mobile app that allows users to search through old posts from friends or pages they followed using keyword searches.

Sound familiar?

The scary part to the search king, if they're paying attention, is that Facebook can now provide even more reliable information seeing that we're able to search up content from only from the people and pages we follow.

We wouldn't befriend people or following pages on Facebook if we didn't trust or at least have a keen interest in them.

And with 1 billion monthly active users on its' mobile application as well - which is exactly how many users Google's Android boasts - the race has only begun.



Photos below

Result on 'Best books of 2014'





(Image Credits: Mashable, Facebook, Google, Win McNamee/Getty Images)