A couple of interesting points here: 1) Beware Google, 2) Facebook Goldmine? and 3) What can we do with Facebook Search?.
1) Beware Google:
The biggest player in the Internet era should be careful, their main source of revenue is in danger: Search. Facebook is now in partnership with Bing (Microsoft Search Engine) to focus on Search around the world, starting with our own: Friends, Places and Photos.
Do you ever want to know witch movie is the best within your friends?, well Google can not answer that!, but Facebook can actually do that with 8 years of data about ourselves and our friends and family.
You can think of Google taking care of Public Search and Facebook of Private Search. This will obviously take a big chunk of Google queries in the future and also: Facebook taking Ads Revenue from Google.
2) Facebook Goldmine?
As shareholders may be thinking: “lets take Google income right now!”. And that is OK, Facebook now has the power and resources of being a huge competition to Google Kingdom.
Remember, this is not only a search where you get links as an answer, this is about getting a unique answer form your friends. Every answer will be different for each one of us. That is great and a huge step to the future!. The internet should be personal.
Also, competition like Yelp and Foursquare should be worry, Facebook will take all their clients in the long term, specially international customers (outside the U.S.).
3) What can we do with Facebook Search?
For example, if you are a recruiter, you can look for employees that have friends in technology companies like Google, Microsoft, apple, oracle, etc. or employees in these companies that live in Boston or even employees from these companies that live in Boston and also have less than 40 years old.
Another option is to look for places to eat in Chicago, that your personal friends on Los Angeles like and recommend. Also read their reviews and comments.
Or you can search for photos that your friends took in a travel to Madrid Spain, where they go, what they do and what they recommend. And search the photos from the last 3 years in Australia, witch are the places with more likes from your friends and the photos that you like the most in order to go and visit that special place.
Conclusion: Facebook is entering in the Search space and no one is going to stop them from making their impact with more than 1 billion users and 8 years of data storage.
Guest Author: Cristian Rennella at Córdoba Catholic University, now working in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, Startup Co-founder at elMejorTrato.com Préstamos Personales.