When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg mentioned during an interview
last month that he wanted to build a search engine, headline writers
instantly put leading search engine Google on notice. Yet, while Larry
and Sergey are probably watching closely, the technology and data at
Facebook’s disposal suggest the company will most likely create
something fundamentally different from Google’s search service.
Facebook lacks the comprehensive index of the Web that it would need
to equal Google’s ability to match queries with web pages — and it would
have to invest a lot to create one.
However, flush with cash from its IPO this summer, the world’s
largest social network already has its own unique stockpile of data —
courtesy of its users’ social lives — that could power a new kind of
search engine altogether. By mining users’ updates about vacations,
music listening interests, online habits, and more, Facebook Search
could be better at answering subjective questions, about what products,
experiences, and businesses you might be interested in, than a
traditional search engine.
“It would be very hard to create a general search engine to match Google,” says
Apostolos Gerasoulis,
a professor at Rutgers University who helped lead work on search
technology at Ask Jeeves after the company acquired his search engine
Teoma
in 2001. Trying to replicate Google’s approach would require Facebook
to spend considerable sums developing and deploying software “bots”
capable of crawling billions of web pages every day to gather a
comprehensive index of the web, he says. “Because Google is so big,”
says Gerasoulis, “They have data for the long tail” — the uncommon
queries for which relatively few pages are a match.
Microsoft’s experience with Bing should caution Facebook against such
an approach. Since 2009, the Redmond company has spent more than $5
billion on Bing, according to
some analyses.
Although the quality of Bing’s results come close to Google’s by some
measures, Microsoft has struggled to turn web users’ heads. It serves
only 15% of U.S. searches, compared with Google’s 65%.
A different approach may be more appealing to users of Facebook and
other websites too. The social network has amassed a huge amount of data
(see “
What Facebook Knows“)
because, in a sense, its users are crawlers that index tiny fragments
of both the web and the offline world. As well as recommending Web
pages, videos, and songs by sharing them with friends, and labeling
those recommendations with relevant descriptions, Facebook users check
into restaurants and other businesses, and post photos tagged to real
locations.
Gerasoulis says that could be the feedstock for a search engine
focused on answering queries about the things that people share and
discuss on Facebook, such as vacations, movies, recipes, and more. “When
you go to specific subjects, the signals Facebook and other social
networks have are amazing,” says Gerasoulis. That approach would also
open up new avenues for advertising revenue, since Facebook could sell
ads that appear next to the results for particular search queries. This
is the very model that provides most of Google’s revenue.
Delivering on that potential would require sophisticated algorithms
capable of weighting social information, says Gerasoulis. Google and
Microsoft have both experimented with such things through their efforts
to introduce social signals into their search engines (see “
Social Search Without a Social Network” and “
Why Bing Likes Facebook“). But Facebook has much more social data to work with than just counts of “Like” button clicks.
Mining users’ comments could help Facebook unlock even more useful data. The new social search engine
Trove
— built by a startup that just began publicly signing up users — hints
at the potential of this approach. It can retrieve content scattered
across a person’s multiple online accounts. For example, a search for
“cute puppy” could reveal an unlabeled Instagram photo of a new pet
because the photo previously elicited a tweet using the word “dog” and a
Facebook comment saying “adorable!”
As the hosts of so much valuable information, “Facebook and Twitter
both have teams working on search,” says Seth Blank, Trove’s founder and
CEO. Digging deep into social data can uncover a wealth of information
and forgotten content related to things people care about, he says, most
of it not accessible by conventional search engines.
“If you’re planning a vacation somewhere, the truth is your networks
have probably already discussed it at length,” says Blank by way of
example; the networks he means consist of friends of friends as well as
direct contacts. Blank believes his company will survive alongside a
Facebook search engine by offering a neutral service capable of linking
together different social sites. So far, the big social networks have
been happy to let Trove work toward that, he says.
As Microsoft discovered, though, technology alone may not be enough
to tempt people to try a new search engine. Facebook’s site already
offers a search box at the top of every page, but people use it
primarily to find other people, not search for content or answers to
questions. Blank says research at Trove has shown that some people
presented with a search box plugged into their social networks struggle
to think of what to search for.
Gerasoulis says that is not an insignificant challenge for Facebook.
“Search is about what you want right now,” says Gerasoulis. “You go to
Facebook and hang out; it doesn’t currently have the same directness.”
If Facebook wants its search engine to succeed, it will need to craft
something that not only is matched to the data the company holds but
makes it clear to its millions of users why they need another search box
in their life.
