Facebook To Officially Compete With Google In Search Market

Sites include Facebook.com , Google.com . Published on September 24th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

900 million people using a platform every day is bound to involve some sort of digging or keyword-probing and this fact is obviously not lost on Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaking at a recent event, Zuckerberg made it clear that Facebook will definitely be competing in the search market. For many this makes sense and speculation has been rife for years as to when Facebook will officially start doing search.

When asked about the possibilities, Zuckerberg said, “We’re basically doing 1 billion queries a day and we’re not even trying.” That nonchalance is understandable given that the 1 billion queries that Facebook sees each day is being done via its basic search feature. A more robust engine will be needed to take on the likes of Google and the Facebook CEO made it very clear which direction things will take: “Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have. At some point we’ll do it. We have a team working on it,” and “Search engines are really evolving to give you a set of answers, ‘I have a specific question, answer this question for me.”

Should Google be worried? For many the answer is no, but for a few, things are not so straightforward. The man tipped to handle the creation of Facebook’s search engine is Lars Rasmussen, the man that helped make Google Maps what it is today. This insider knowledge of the Google architecture makes a few people think that Facebook search might just be able to compete with Google search.

What say you, can Facebook build a better search engine? Share your thoughts below.