Following Microsoft’s deal with Facebook, Google obtained a narrower deal. Facebook is now being approached for socially-driven real time search results, which in turn helps Microsoft and Google on displaying contextually search queries. Microsoft’s Bing has access to all of Facebook’s public news feeds for this purpose, while the recently revealed details of Google’s deal with Facebook indicates that the massive search engine will only be able to access the public news feeds of Facebook Pages.
Facebook may provide the ability for any search engine to tap into its database for real time search results. As a result, competing with Twitter’s extremely public forum. However, Facebook needs to keep its relationship with users intact, this follows Facebook’s advantage on its ability to keep information private at a customizable user level.
This further opening up of Facebook’s public news feeds will be better search engine published as and when Microsoft provides opportunities for its own data monetization. For Microsoft’s own search engine project Bing, Facebook’s public news feed content is already incorporated into its real time search results. Twitter content is included as well, giving a well-rounded approach to real-time search results with a particular slant on social networking data.
Microsoft and others may be looking to topple Google by providing more context around search engine results derived from social media data. It follows socially generated real-time search results as it provides a learning curve for accessing search results that offer deeper context in relation to the web data.
Real time search still has its issues and qualms. As a still-new aspect of web search, we have not fully realized the potential behind real time search and the use of socially-generated content. Additionally, the mass of social networking content being used for real time search results still lacks the context of filtered and verified sources for pointing you in the right direction.
In the end, Google may still find a way to win this race by combining its ranking algorithm with real time search results, giving users the context they need to make the best decisions regarding their interaction with web content. Google’s acknowledgment of socially-driven sites like Twitter and Facebook is a strategy into the future of web search.
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