How Facebook Can Kill Google Completely

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Ben Elowitz, cofounder of Wetpaint and Blue Nile, says Facebook can put Google out of business.

At first glance, the statement is absurd. Google seems unbeatable. But Elowitz makes a good point.

Google has been unbeatable because its search algorithm churns out the most accurate results — for anonymous users.

Should Facebook — which already knows the behavioral patters of 600 million people — move into search, their results could be targeted to specific individuals. Like targeted ads, they could have targeted search.

Elowitz explains on TechCrunch:

Facebook’s data allows it to do more than just guess what its customers might be interested in; the company’s data can help it know with greater certainty what its customers are really interested in. And this key difference could potentially give Facebook a tremendous advantage in search when it eventually decides to move in that direction.

If Google’s business has been built on choosing which Web pages, out of all those in the universe, are most likely to appeal to any given (but anonymous) query string, think about this: Facebook already knows, for the most part, which pages appeal to whom—specifically and directly.

And, even more powerfully, Facebook knows each of our individual and collective behavior patterns well enough to predict what we’ll like even without us expressing our intent.

Of course Google has a many other products besides search. But killing the company’s foundation would be hard to recover from.

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