Facebook vs. Google Has the new search war begun?

Valerie | 12 Aug 2009, 07:19

In a week that has so far been dominated by social media stories, most significant perhaps is the news that Facebook has acquired real-time feed aggregator FriendFeed in what industry commentators believe is a direct challenge to Google.

The deal is largely perceived as a move by the world’s largest social network to boost its social technology, specifically real-time streams, conversations, social media aggregation and search and move further into territory currently held by Google and Twitter.

Founded in 2007 by four former Google employees, FriendFeed has gained a devout following of more than a million users with its all-in-one approach to social networking. According the Guardian, it allows members to interact with a variety of different websites from a single place, plugging into popular sites like Blogger, Facebook, Digg and YouTube.

New features unveiled include being able to find out what friends and strangers have posted online by searching within a friend’s profiles for comments they have made within the last 30 day.

Commenting on the news, influential media blogger Robert Scoble and one of Friendfeed’s most popular users with nearly 46,000 subscribers said:

“FriendFeed has in effect been the R&D (research & development) department for Facebook for some time now.

“They have the best community technology out there and Facebook should continue to use them to try out new features and test them out before transferring them over to Facebook.“

According to Mashable, the timing is no coincidence. On the same day, Facebook also announced the launch of a new real-time search engine, which allows users to see the latest status updates and shared content from both friends and all users who have made their profile open to everyone.

This blog perhaps best sums up the significance of the two announcements, highlighting that whilst Facebook is making public timeline search available for the first time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously indicated that the future of Facebook lies in a hybrid public/private sharing model.

It may be too early to tell whether Facebook can leverage the social graph in providing more relevant search results for time-sensitive or research-related queries, however the news marks an important step in Facebook’s evolution and could reshape the way in which consumers access digital content. By bringing its vision of social search closer to reality, it could increasingly threaten Google and Microsoft’s search dominance.