Google vs Facebook: The Battle of the Giants

In the left corner, we have Google. Launched in 1998, the search engine has a following of users that spreads worldwide

The Competitors In the left corner, we have Google. Launched in 1998, the search engine has a following of users that spreads worldwide, and is well known for it's unrelenting desire to present the user with the most relevant and trustworthy websites in it's results pages. With this in mind, Google has become the number 1 search engine to rank in high positions for given terms, as it drives the most traffic, with approx 80% of the search market. In the right corner, Facebook. Perhaps the biggest social networking site online at the moment, it was originally founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Initially, it was only accessible by students of Harvard College, MA but later become free-access for all. With it's social media status, you wouldn't necessarily think that it would be used to find links for shopping, travel and information, but that's where you'd be wrong......... The Fight Facebook is now seen as an important challenger to search engine giant Google. Users of the site are quite naturally posting links to queries from friends that may be too personal to be answered by Google's results. Websites that have been used by a friend and given a personal recommendation are seen as being more trustworthy than those served up by Google, especially considering that more tech-savvy users are perhaps looking for more than a list of links as an answer to their question. The recently released search engine WolframAlpha could potentially be more useful for certain types of queries, and now it seems Facebook is also honing in on that advantage. Google does provide some additional information, such as questions to maths equations, price quotes for queries such as 'Sony stock' and answers to questions about geography, for example. However, it does seem Facebook is providing more in the way of personalised, trustworthy results than Google can, to a certain type of user. The Result It certainly seems that, for the foreseeable future, Google will remain the media bigwig when it comes to providing users with the results they want from their queries. After all, they are still taking fresh users from both Yahoo! and MSN, even with increased effort on both competitors parts (Microsoft's Kumo, for example). However, whilst Facebook may be seen to be down, it certainly isn't out, and with the increased numbers of online users looking for a good deal, Google might want to ensure their socks are firmly pulled up on this one.

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