Facebook a Strong Contender in Google’s Supremacy

The worldwide social networking site, Facebook, poses a big threat to Google Inc. and its supremacy on the internet world in terms of how people live, work, play and search online. The Facebook, which was launched in 2004 and now worth an estimated 6.9 billion dollars, is gaining a global popularity due its unique and innovative characteristics as a website. The Facebook allows users to experience a rich level of personalization based on the user’s preference and the recommendations of Facebook friends, as opposed to Google, which just delivers search results selected by algorithms based on the user’s web history.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, refers to this kind of experience as a social graph. “I think what we’ve found is that when you can use products with your friends and your family and the people you care about they tend to be more engaging.”

Wedbush Securities social media analyst, Lou Kerner, said that Facebook is becoming widely popular with more than 500 million users. “Social media is an increasingly important part of how you reach people and it’s a growing part of every marketer’s budget. The idea is you do not want to fight Facebook, you want to embrace Facebook and leverage Facebook because this is where people are going to spend increasing amounts of time.”

According to analysts, Facebook has been developing features to put the site in direct competition with Google recently: For instance, @facebook.com email service that competes with Google’s Gmail and “Facebook Questions,” a search engine of sorts that lets Facebook members ask questions and get answers from other members. However, Kener explained that despite the stiff competition, Google and Facebook can benefit from one another. “Google is not going away. Google, in fact, I think is going to benefit from the emergence of social media. Because what it’s doing is it drives people to spend more time online and when you’re spending more time online, you end up doing more searches”