Google, the world’s leading Web search business, and Facebook, the largest social networking site with over half a billion users globally are arguably the top two ‘most visited’ websites. With Facebook now offering email and Google launching Google+, their latest social networking foray, the competition has just gotten fiercer with the companies now stepping foot in each other’s domains. Google leverages its search engine capacity by crawling through trillions of website content one at a time and indexing it in their servers which are then displayed as results for a search query. Facebook has fended off Google’s crawler by close guarding its information which means Google has no way of knowing what Facebook knows about the lifestyles, interests and other personal information of millions of Facebookers. With Facebook’s growing popularity and people spending more time on Facebook then on Google, the latter has reason to fear.
Today, the Google-Facebook rivalry isn’t just about being the better one but has evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet—its structure, design, and utility. For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build an atlas of the online world. While Google’s mathematical approach was to aid people get information outside their social circle, Facebook’s approach is help people get information from within their social circle which essentially is what defines the fabric of our society. Facebook envisions a future where the internet has a more humanised approach with our social circles coming alive to help us find the information we need bringing Facebook into the epicentre of the next Internet revolution which only means – Facebook now threatens to question the very existence of Google.
July 15, 2011
Posted in brand activation, internet marketing, market trends
