Voices
PETER
SCHEER
HUFFINGTON
01.27.13
JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
Facebook’s New Search
Graph Is Google’s
Nightmare Come True
ALTHOUGH THE STOCK MARKET yawned at Facebook’s announcement of “Graph Search,”
its new search service, with investors wagering it would only hurt
smaller, vertical search services
like Yelp and Linkedin, the truth
is that it is potentially much more
significant than that.
For the last several years
Google’s management has had
two nightmares. The first focused on the mass migration in
internet usage from computers to
smartphones, a development that
threatened Google’s core business — search engine advertising
— because phone makers (read:
Apple) had no incentive to integrate Google’s ads (as opposed to
its search results) into their handset displays.
Google’s second nightmare is
about Facebook. Increasingly, the
digital universe consists of two
internets: The vast universe that
Google is able to index and search;
and the walled-off portion, accounting for some 20-30 percent
of total internet usage, represented by Facebook — which Google
most definitely is not able to index
and search.
In this nightmare, Mark Zuck-
Facebook
CEO Mark
Zuckerberg in
September of
2011.