Facebook's and Google's weekly battle for supremacy
About 18 months ago I was at a wedding on the West Coast with some folks from Google. An interesting topic of conversation was about “Who could unseat Google?” and, generally, the importance of search. A major theme of this discussion was about how as technology and user behavior changes, the leaders in one era rarely make effective transitions to become winners in the next era.
Google bested Webcrawler, Northern Lights, and other online search companies, but – more importantly – search beat out directories such as Yahoo! and AOL as the preferred way to find and access information on the Internet. Our little group agreed that none of the search contenders (Ask.com, etc. – there was no Bing yet) had a chance.
I argued that social networking in general and Facebook in particular were the biggest threats. Hours and hours of online activity are occurring on Facebook where Google has no sway, no advertising opportunities, and no information about what users are doing. More importantly, Facebook is becoming an important mode of content discovery: People recommend books, sneakers, music, and movies to their friends. It is also becoming an important method for spreading breaking news. Facebook is, for example, how I found out about the Ft. Hood shootings.
Today, I saw some extremely intereresting data on Alexa.com that shows how this battle is playing out. The following chart shows how each week Facebook and Google flip-flop as the Internet leader in total pageviews. Facebook rules on the weekend; Google rules during the week:
Each weekend Facebook passes Google in pageviews; during the week Google reclaims the lead (data from Alexa.com)
This has been going on since Facebook caught up to Google back in August:
This pattern has been repeating since August of 2009 (data from Alexa.com)
Let me know what you think. Will social networking displace search as the default approach to discovery on the Internet? What are the implications for Facebook and Google if this occurs?
(By the way, this is the second time that Facebook caught Google in share of total pageviews. The first time was during the 2008 Presidential Election. After the election, Facebook’s pageview share dropped precipitously and took about six months to recover to their prior level.)
Moe,
That’s very interesting data indeed. I use Google for work and Facebook to waste time so it does make sense that Facebook is more popular on the weekends.
It’ll be interesting to see how Google and Facebook combine social networks and search for content discovery. Maybe the Googlers you spoke to spent some serious time thinking about this – the company just introduced Social Search as an experiment.
Take care,
Peter
For now, people are using Google and Facebook to do different jobs (or sets of jobs). Facebook does not provide the depth and range of information that Google does. However, disruptive technologies often start out with worse performance on the traditional dimension of value, and continue to improve until they can compete. They also often shift what is considered “value.”
Will social networking displace search? That depends on whether social networks become good enough in information and content discovery, and whether they can shift the competition to a different dimension. Maybe quantity is not the key dimension. Maybe trust (built on referrals) is.
Twitter may be as much or more of a threat than Facebook. On Twitter, many members have chosen one or two topics to specialize in, aiming to become a respected and relied on source for news and notes in that subject area. Many of the people I’ve chosen to follow I selected because I am interested in the subjects of their posts. They offer me information without searching at all.
Regards,
Cyndi H