Have social media begun to reinvent the way we use search engines?

To understand what might be in store for this marriage in 2010, we can start by looking at a chain of events that started last October.  First Microsoft announced a deal with Twitter, allowing Bing to index Twitter’s entire public stream. The same day, they announced a similar deal with Facebook. And before that day was through, Google announced their own deal with Twitter. A busy 24 hours for the real-time search revolution.  Later on, in December, Google made a vague announcement of a content deal with Facebook which just might have been similar to what Bing had pulled off.  By the end of 2009, the two big players in search had each teamed up with the two big players in social media.  The digital community finally had their John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Why is this such a big deal?  Consider this week’s report from eMarketer (“Facebook Dominates Social Content-Sharing“) which identifies Facebook as the the top social media site on which U.S. internet users share online content (representing 44% of the audience).  Twitter was second at 29%.  Combined, that’s almost three-quarters of the U.S. internet population.

(By the way, Google has MySpace streams in its index, too. Take that, Bing.)

In the new front of the war for search engine dominance, Google’s tremendous lead over Bing in terms of market share (65% to 11% according to comScore, or 65-28 if you factor in the eventual consummation of the Yahoo-Bing search alliance) matters little.  The new front is social search, and the playing field is far more level… especially with the recent news that Google would be indexing content posted to Facebook pages.

That is indeed a nice step forward, but here’s what it’s not: personal status updates.  Those go to Bing.  So in the world of social search, there’s a clear line in the sand beginning to emerge.  Facebook Pages, at least the most visible and content-rich ones, tend to be managed by organizations.  And status updates, those are managed by individuals.  Is Facebook pitting Google and Microsoft against one another, giving each party one half of the puzzle, and letting them fight it out?

Let’s add one last layer, just to up the ante once and for all.  Apparently Facebook has not charged either Google or Bing a single penny to access this valuable data.  According to Danny Sullivan, Google did all they could to keep the financial terms ambiguous… but Facebook was happy to talk.

The battle for social search is a battle for individuals’ motivations, aspirations, biases and opinions.  Mastery over these translates into a gold mine of consumer insight. This was the basis for our discussion back in January about commercially-oriented behavior in the social media space (“Peer Purchase Influence: Quantifying the power of word-of-mouth“).  There are a lot of people out there using social media to gainfully influence consumers’ behavior — for example (source: PostRelease survey conducted by Synovate):

• influencing a decision about a product purchase – 54% of U.S. internet users
• sharing advice based on online research – 41%
• rating/reviewing products online – 26%
• outright recommending a purchase to someone – 25%

And nowhere are these actions, or the seeds that underlie them, captured with more accuracy and scalability than on Facebook.  If one social search engine indexes pages, and the other indexes personal status updates, each is left needing a key missing ingredient to complete the circle.

In time, we may see that Facebook teaches these two giants a lesson in Marketing 101: a loss leader today could pave the way for a windfall tomorrow.  If social search continues to evolve within Google and Bing, the absence of the other half of Facebook’s data will become ever more apparent… and ever more costly to rectify.

About Paul Burani

Paul Burani - Partner, Web Liquid Group. Connect with me on Google+

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