Venture Beat considers the possibility of Facebook taking on Google:
Facebook has added a new option for its search bar, allowing users to search for advertising pages.
This continues a steady creep in search options, which already includes tabs to search for people, groups, events and applications.
It raises a new question about Facebook’s ambitions, as it finds itself the David against the Google Goliath. Will it pull out the ultimate slingshot: a full-fledged search engine for the web, not just the Facebook site?
This question is significant, because Facebook has so much data about people and preferences that it could potentially add quality to search results. 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.
Read more here.
Facebook will have the difficult task of changing people's habits of saying "just google it". Somehow "facebook it" doesn't have the same ring to it...
Posted by: JP | Monday, 12 November 2007 at 10:09 PM