If you thought Pepsi vs Coke was good. Wait until you see Facebook vs Google vs Bing!
by Julian Gratton
During the 1980s and 1990s, two giants of the soft drinks world went to war. In the red corner we had the Coca-Cola Company. In the blue corner was PepsiCo. While Coca-Cola would entice us with the ‘New Coke’ before seducing us back again with ‘Classic Coke’; Pepsi used a whole host of pop and movie stars to show us they were the ‘Taste for a New Generation’ and even went as far as demonstrating to us that the average person on the street preferred Pepsi thanks to their ‘Pepsi Challenge’.
Just when we thought the marketing landscape was getting a little dull, we now have a new battle on the horizon. Instead of battling to quench your thirst… this time we have a battle to satisfy your online search needs. Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls… let’s get ready to rumble as Facebook, Google and Microsoft go to war in the battle to become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the search engines.
The gloves are off.
If you’ve been reading the technology pages of newspapers or news sites over the last few years you’ll have seen a multitude of stories regarding Facebook, Google and Microsoft. On the same day that Facebook launched ‘Facebook Connect’, Google launched ‘Friend Connect’, which allows users to link to any of the major social networking sites.
Four months after Facebook failed in a bid to buy Twitter for $500 million, Google was in talks to purchase the site… which prompted Facebook to re-look at the way it works, and now it operates more like Twitter. And if they wanted to annoy Facebook even more, Google recently announced Wave… a web communications platform that encourages communications and sharing that is similar to Facebook.
Not wanting to miss out on the act and obviously having an eye on Google’s crown… Microsoft, Google’s sworn enemy, made a $240 million investment into Facebook, obviously aware that having a stake in the company could one day help in the race to become the most popular search engine.
But you may ask, what makes one search engine different from the other… essentially do they not all just search the Internet for us? To answer that, lets take a look at our three contenders.
Google – the current heavyweight champion of search engines and the one everyone wants to beat.
According to ComScore, who are a leader in measuring the ‘digital world’. Out of 14.8 billion searches conducted in April 2009 in the USA alone; 64.2% of these were done on Google. The nearest challenger being Yahoo with only 20.4%.
For over ten years, Google’s algorithms have defined the Internet. On top of that has been the profit-making machine that is Adwords and AdSense; but neither of these would be as big as they are if it were not for the clever way in which Google is powered.
Google runs on a distributed network of thousands of low-cost computers and can therefore carry out fast parallel processing. Parallel processing is a method of computation in which many calculations can be performed simultaneously, significantly speeding up data processing. There are three distinct parts that makes Google work as effectively as it does, these are:
· Googlebot. A web crawler that finds and fetches web pages, think of it like a spider, scurrying across the strands of cyberspace finding web content then handing that content over to Google’s indexer.
· The indexer. This sorts every word on every page and stores the resulting index of words in a huge database. The way this database is structured allows rapid access to documents that contain user query terms.
· The query processor. This compares your search query to the index and recommends the documents that it considers most relevant… resulting in your search results, both paid for and organic.
Facebook – the young up-and-coming challenger who’s getting in the Champ’s face.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has long envisioned a more personalized, humanized Internet. An Internet where our network of friends, peers, family and interest groups are the primary source of information. Essentially your friends replace Google’s algorithms to create a more personalized search result.
Considering that more than 200 million people have Facebook accounts, which accounts for nearly one fifth of all Internet users, it’s easy to see how Facebook Search could soon find itself challenging for Google’s Crown. Especially if the promise of a more personalised search result based on your chosen associations comes good.
And if that’s not enough to convince you that Facebook is a contender, here is their four-step plan to search engine domination.
1. Build Critical Mass. Facebook’s 200 million members now contribute 4 billion pieces of info. 850 million photos and 8 million videos every month. The result of this is a second Internet, an Internet that includes users’ most personal data and resides entirely on Facebook’s servers.
2. Redefine Search. Why turn to computers and spiders and algorithms to find your search results when you can turn to your friends and other associations. Facebook already drives a huge amount of traffic to external sites and that will only increase once Facebook Search allows users to explore one another’s feeds.
3. Colonise the Web. Thanks to things like Facebook Connect and Open Stream, Facebook users don’t have to log into Facebook to communicate with their friends. Now they can access their network from any one of 10,000 partner sites. This contributes even more valuable data to Facebook’s servers.
4. Sell targeted ads everywhere. Taking a leaf out of Google’s book, Facebook plans to sell advertising across all of its partner sites and apps. These ads will be highly personalized and targeted based on the information people have in their feeds… telling your friends you have a new baby… all of a sudden your Facebook page is covered in ads for nappies and baby milk!
Bing – a revitalised contender that has risen from the ashes of what everyone thought was a ‘has-been’.
Microsoft is not a new player when it comes to creating Internet search engines. Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search have proved popular with Internet users… just not as popular as Google. Their dwindling market share over the last few years has prompted Microsoft to explore something new in the hope that they can build on their miniscule 8.2% share of the search engine market.
The new search engine will help users refine their queries and initially offer four different categories of search: purchases, travel, health and local businesses. Bing also organizes search results in relevant groups rather than just as a series of links… but it is the impending future of Bing that could see it outsmart the competition.
In 2008 Microsoft showed their hand when it came to their intentions for what they felt would be the future of the Internet search engine when they purchased a company called PowerSet. PowerSet are a company based in San Francisco that has been developing a ‘natural language search engine’.
A natural language search engine works completely different to other search engines. For example, if you did a search for ‘What is the best curry house in Bradford?’, traditional search engines would only see the keywords… those being ‘curry and Bradford’. Powerset on the other hand, attempts to use natural language processing to understand the nature of the question and return pages containing the answer. So instead of just a list of curry houses in Bradford you would indeed receive what are regarded as the best in my hometown… in case you are curious, it is the Mumtaz on Great Horton Road.
So how’s it going to play out?
It’s fair to say that both Facebook Search and Bing have their work cut out for them to hack into Google’s considerable market share. Certainly both of these players are not short of a bob or two… with Microsoft chucking some $80 million behind the launch of their new toy. And with Microsoft now owning a small share in Facebook, they’ll be well placed to utilise the power of Facebook search into Bing should they ever need to.
Google is going to remain the primary search engine for the great majority of the Internet population. Most analysts would argue that it is still the best product. Google’s engineers improve its search system religiously so the odds that Microsoft or Facebook will overtake it in the next five years are nigh on impossible. They may though cut into Yahoo’s 20% share rather considerably, thus giving them the building blocks and the belief that they can decrease the Google market share maybe in the next ten to fifteen years.
One thing’s for sure, for the average internet user, the way we search the internet can only benefit from this fighting… as the winner will undoubtedly be the one who provides quick, accurate and intelligent search results… fast!
If you’d like to know more about search engines and search engine marketing… why not give Red C a call on 0161 872 1361 or click here
Tags: Bing, Cola wars, Direct Marketing Agency, Facebook Connect, Facebook Search, Google Wave, Internet Advertising Agency Manchester, Manchester Advertising Agency, Manchester Interactive Agency, PPC Marketing Agency, Social Media Marketing, Twitter Marketing
