Posted by Dan Brough, SVP, Search Director, Draftfcb New York
The battle for “search supremacy” intensified yesterday at the Web 2.0 conference. First, Microsoft announced deals involving both Facebook and Twitter. In the former collaboration, status messages from public Facebook profiles will now appear in Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. The latter deal has Bing announcing its integration of Twitter via bing.com/twitter.
Not to be outdone, Google later announced its “Social Search” element - Touché! This feature will allow users logged into Google Profiles to have their search results appear in their organic Web results. While Twitter results will be indexed, Facebook will not be included.
It’s important to note that neither the Microsoft nor Google deals involve exclusivity.
Thoughts:
- While neither Microsoft nor Google plan on placing ads for now, you can bet the house they will eventually, as they work through monetization
- Without Facebook – which has a huge lead on Twitter with regards to size – Google will need to place a strong emphasis on getting more users to create Google Profiles.
- On the Microsoft side, I think the real challenge will involve Facebook and how they control what information is currently deemed “public.” Almost every person I know guards his/her Facebook accounts as “private,” which would limit the amount of status updates Bing could index. Facebook will need to continue to figure out how to get more information into the public domain while addressing privacy concerns and negative user sentiment.
In 1980s-speak, the search/social media arms race continues at a fevered pitch among Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter! These announcements are still less than 24-hrs old, so be sure to follow me @broughstyle for continued updates.