Do you find yourself using traditional search engines less and less? Are you using the Bing search functionality in Facebook? How often do you find yourself using Twitter Search?
The answers to these questions may surprise you, as users continue to flock to major social networks as their main information portal. Everything from news to comments, IM to email, videos to pictures, the web is a very different place than 5 years ago. “More searches are going to start to be done inside social networks,” said Steve Rubel, director of insights at Edelman. “Social networks are going to start to make it easier for you to search content at point of information.” So while Google is excited about the growth opportunity of the social web and continues to smash their numbers, they have to be terrified of how this can ignite the growth of their nemesis, Facebook.
Its no secret Facebook and Google are at the head table, both with huge stakes of chips and ready for a game of No-limit Texas holdem. One could argue they are leaders in two very different areas of the web. However perhaps for the first time ever, social networking sites have surpassed the traffic search engines receive. How will this continue to change the web as we know it? This debate will wage on for the foreseeable future, as each of them continue to raise the stakes of this game of No-limit Texas holdem.
Sure, Google is already moving quickly to provide an all inclusive “Social Search” functionally. But is this enough to entice users to leave their favorite social network for search?
