Brian Feinstein

In the last post, I left off with a Facebook play in the search space. It is important to understand that Facebook has opportunities in search because of a) its sizable user base, b) its access to user data, and c) it’s talented engineers and data experts.

In December, nearly 20% of US Internet users visited Facebook and the average user spent 3.5 hrs per month on the site. As Justin Smith points out, many Facebook users simply live on the site. I hesitate to use the world portal but Facebook has become to go-to destination for many young Internet users. In light of this, Facebook has the potential to adopt the following iterative search strategy:

1. Add a Microsoft-Powered search field. Given the success Google has had with search fields that reside on third-party websites, it is clear that many users will use the first search box they see. Facebook’s relationship with Microsoft makes it ideally suited for implementing a Microsoft-powered search field and earning a nice SEM revenue share.

2. Improve the Microsoft search engine with proprietary data. As Doug Sherrets writes, “If it were to duplicate a “good-enough” clone of Google search results — possibly by building on Microsoft’s search engine — and then add in its own data (all of the stuff that is password protected and which Google’s spiders can’t get to), Facebook could potentially provide a first class search engine that really rivals Google.”

3. Build its own. Given that the existing search engine interface is not ideally suited for social search (e.g. if I ask “what is a good date restaurant in Central Square?” I don’t want to merely see a listing of restaurants). Even Merissa Mayer doesn’t seem to have an answer for what social search will look like. As she said in a recent VentureBeat article, “I think it’s too early in the evolution of the space to really know if it will be searches yielding better browse and discovery mechanisms or if it will be manipulation within search itself.” This means that if Facebook can come up with a way for users to query in an interface that effectively displays information contextualized by their social relationships, and also tap into the information that resides in their friends’ brains, there is an opportunity for a paradigm shift in search– either as a competitor to Google or (more likely) a complement that addresses questions like “What movie should I see?” or “What hotel should I stay at?”