What if Facebook Has a Search Engine
Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in an interview that he wants to build a search engine. The journalist puts Google in the headline purposely. This article above provides some arguments about how Facebook can build a successful search engine. The author says it is really hard for Facebook to duplicate Google directly. It may take Facebook a lot of efforts to build a similar search engine because Google is so big that it will require considerable sums to gather information for the index of millions of websites. Unlike Google, Facebook has its own unique networking resources which is its huge user data. It can develop some search engine focused on answering queries about the things people share and discuss on Facebook, such as movies and recipes.
In the lectures, we have discussed about how search engine makes use of link information for ranking and how they implemented matching markets for selling advertising. This is the mode of success for Google. As is discussed in the article, if Facebook builds its search engine, it can definitely sell advertising by exploiting its huge amount of its user’s data. Its matching market is user’s activities or user’s favor. For example, someone types “Obama” in the search engine. If it is Google, the top results will probably be the breaking news about his electron. While, if it is typed in the Facebook’s search engine, the higher ranking results will be some popular videos or interesting pictures. Then the advertisements will be targeted differently in both search engines. This example shows the difference in selling advertisings for both companies. In the class, we talked about how search engines like Google ranks its searching results. However, that algorithm may not be helpful for Facebook. The first reason is, as discussed in the article, it is costly to build a search engine to process millions of webs. Google is already very successful. It is hard to compete with it. Another reason is that Facebook can utilize its own user sources. For example, it can rank the results based on how many “like”s it has. This is just a very simple assumption about its ranking methodology. I strongly believe Facebook ‘s desire for a search engine will generate some creative algorithms in the future.
—-Vincent-jw