Google’s New Search War

People that know search engines know that the latest and greatest trend is real time and social searching. And with it’s newly launched real-time search engine and acquisition of FriendFeed it appears that Facebook is setting itself up to be Google’s newest and potentially most worthy competitor. With the sheer amount of data that Facebook collects about what people are interested in and what they’re doing, Facebook is in a position to take the lead in real-time and social search. And while the 30 million of Facebook’s 250 million registered users who update their status at least once per day are not currently used to sharing their updates with the world, Facebook is trying to change that.

By purchasing FriendFeed Facebook acquired a powerful and ready-made real-time search product and a social status platform that is arguably better than Twitter’s. Facebook also gained access to an influential user base of early adopters willing to try to evangelize new products.

Importantly, Facebook also now has a collection of highly capable ex-Google engineers who really understand the ins and outs of real-time search. And while last year Facebook failed to buy Twitter, they now have the technology and engineering talent they were seeking at 1/10th of the price. At just under a $50 million price tag FriendFeed was probably the smarter choice. If Facebook and its new FriendFeed team can figure out how to utilize user data in real-time its hundreds of millions monthly visitors could turn into hundreds of millions of monthly searchers. And that is something that would threaten Google’s core business.

Another important fact is that Microsoft’s Bing already powers web search results on Facebook. Considering that Yahoo! will also soon serve Bing search results, what would happen if Facebook’s real-time, social web search results were to find their way onto Yahoo? This plausible possibility could completely change the way that people use and search the internet and is a very dangerous eventuality to Google.