How Facebook Can Become Bigger In Five Years Than Google Is Today

Re:How Facebook Can Become Bigger In Five Years Than Google ... by dinkumthinkum on Saturday October 02, 2010 @09:10PM (#1751815)

I think the big problem with this idea is that Facebook is far more vulnerable to changes in fads and so forth than Google is. For the forseeable future we will need something like Google and Google will probably continue to stay on top (if they don't keep putting out Google Instants) but Facebook could much more easily be hit hard by a new social networking paradigm or some kind of fad change. Also, interestingly, it seems like probably the vast majority of Facebook's users use Google but converse is probably not true.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Facebook Can Become Bigger In Five Years Than Google ... by photon_off on Sunday October 03, 2010 @02:43AM (#1752249)

Google will probably continue to stay on top (if they don't keep putting out Google Instants)

Google Instant only gains Google dominance. You may not like it, but some people do. That adds to Google's stickiness; those people are now much less likely to switch search engines. If the $.12/query rate is to be believed, that stickiness is extremely valuable in the long run. As for those that do no prefer Instant, I suspect they didn't have any trouble disabling it.

As a nice little bonus, Google gained notoriety for their Instant search. This means anyone else who implements it in the future will be riding in Google's coattails, and will be much less likely to realize the positive effects that Google did.

If it were up to me, I'd have Google churning out more of these features. I believe it's already the case that "search" is a commodity, and it's now the bells and whistles that are the point of competition. Google already has a huge head start, and they now need to maintain it.

[ Parent | on HN ]