Last week comScore showed Facebook had passed Google in terms of time spent online. There is no doubt that Facebook is the web’s biggest time sink, also if you take a look at the numbers released by Hitwise you can find web surfers spending more time socializing on Facebook than searching with Google. Of course, comScore and Hitwise only counts users from the U.S. but that thing prompted a wide variety of people to think that “google is dead” and “facebook will become the internet” or something similar!! But the reality is that Facebook and Google are moving in two different way, Google is manage the world's information not a social site!
The concept of “usefulness” is at the core of the famous PageRank algorithm, it uses the importance of links and connections “most likely” by measuring its relative importance within the other pages, and mixes in the background information to create potential links that maximize the probability that someone searching will go through and find something that is. By this way, the user will come back to Google to search something. While the value of Facebook is in its inclusiveness because the updates of wall are mostly interesting for only users in the same social circle!
When two companies are competing head to head with similar products and similar strategies, whoever executes better will likely win. Not two companies are betting on entirely different distribution channels!! Well, they’re comparing Facebook – where you can do lots of stuff, like chat, see pics, watch videos, leave status updates, do Facebook private message, etc – to only Google’s search engine!! I think if you add up all the Google properties in this top 20 list – Gmail, YouTube, and Google Maps – Google still clearly comes out on top. It’s hard to imagine anyone will ever choose Facebook over Google!!
