“How can I compete with Google?”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes he has found the answer with the social network’s first major foray into the search market.
Yesterday, he unveiled a way to search for people, places, photos and interests on the site. Called Graph Search, it uses the “social graph,” or friends and connections, to deliver results.
Until now, Facebook’s search feature has been limited mostly to specific name searches. The new offering will roll out slowly in the coming weeks and was available only to a few hundred thousand users yesterday.
Facebook shares hardly budged because it didn’t immediately announce plans to sell ads against search results in the same way Google does.
Still, the clear rival is Google, which handles two-thirds of desktop searches and 90 percent of mobile queries.
Google’s social media efforts have involved prepping for the day when Facebook harnesses its trove of personal data for search.
Its Google Plus network was built to pick up on social cues, while its purchases of companies like Zagat give it a gold mine of user recommendations to serve up.
Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodali, an analyst for research firm Forrester, said that Facebook has a long way to go before it catches up.
“The value of such content from your friends depends on quality and volume of such information,” she said. “If Facebook can actually create some curation algorithm where restaurants that already get good ratings now also have friends who like it, then you’re onto something.”
Michael Hussey, CEO of New York-based PeekYou, a people search firm, said that for every percentage point Facebook can snag of the search market from Google, it can add $2 billion to its market cap.
“The great thing about search is it’s the easiest thing to monetize on the Web,” said said Hussey. “You know exactly what someone is looking for.”
Zuckerberg showed off the new service at the company’s Menlo Park, Calif.-headquarters and was careful to address privacy concerns. He stressed that the feature will only show results that have been made public to users by friends or people with open privacy settings.
The results will pick up likes, photos that have been tagged, locations where people check-in, and other public actions. Right now, it will not search older posts based on keywords.
Industry observers said that Facebook’s first-generation search features are tame compared to what it could do — and that’s by design.
“They’ve learned how to roll out new features that have privacy implications,” said Hussey. “Rather than roll out everything at once and scare people, they do it more bit by bit.”
Facebook’s new search feature is geared toward directing people to what friends might recommend in a given location, such as a restaurant or book store.
The recommendation potential was enough to scare Yelp investors yesterday, who saw competition. Yelp’s stock slid 7 percent to $20.41.