Facebook vs Google - Can Facebook Give Google A Run For Its Money In Search

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Facebook has been taking the fight to Google in the online video advertising space, but is the social media giant poised to take on the search giant in online search? Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) has for the first time made its more than 2 trillion posts available for search. Facebook search will now return anything that is accessible to users’ via their privacy settings using keyword based searches pretty much like how Alphabet Inc-A (NASDAQ:GOOGL) search works. And that includes public posts by all Facebook users and not just a user’s friends. Facebook’s revamped search engine will make it a formidable alternative to Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) and Google for real-time news search.

The new update by Facebook also raises the possibility that Facebook posts might, in future, be indexed and integrated into Google and Bing search results. Twitter already has such an integration deal with the two leading search engines.

Google vs Facebook – Facebook to Monetize Search?

Although Facebook has said that it’s not interested in monetizing search at the moment, keyword-based search appears to be a natural fit for the revamped platform. Notably, Facebook told TechCrunch this when asked about the possibility of monetizing its expanded search platform:

“Because the business model for search is so well understood, we know it will come when it makes sense.”

So Facebook’s latest move might be a thinly veiled attempt to move into Google’s forte: making tons of money from displaying ads next to search results.

Facebook already has the #1 requirement for a platform to truly monetize search: a massive userbase. With more than a billion users, Facebook’s platform usage easily rivals Google’s. Goggle is an extremely well-oiled machine as ar as online search goes. Google handles more than 3 billion searches per day, and more than a trillion every year. Facebook has about 968 million daily active users of its platform, which implies that it can easily achieve Google’s daily search numbers if each person did only four searches on the platform every day.

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