Google and Facebook get personal in battle for social networking rewards
Launch of Google+ sees the online giants in a fight for the highly lucrative hearts and minds of internet users
It is one month since the launch of Google+, a belated attempt at a social networking tool that invites users to follow friends' activities in their news feed and share favourite content by marking it "+1". If this sounds familiar, it shows the extent to which Google is playing catchup with Facebook, which is brewing a public offering next year that could value the firm at $100bn and, critically, has positioned itself as the gateway to the web for many of its 750 million users.
Much of this pressure is down to the abrasive ambition of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Even Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has conceded that Google has been late to the social networking space, with identity and personalisation now critical to the social experience for consumers, and the lucrative commercial opportunities that advertisers expect. But with Google's proven commercial success nudging its market value towards $200bn, and data vaults that hold the browsing histories of most of the online population, is Google really on a downward trajectory, and is the era of search really ending?
Ben Gomes has worked on every aspect of Google's core search product and is leading exploration into the social navigation of search. Despite Google's forays into everything from video communities to mobile operating systems, he insists that at its heart Google is still a search company. It was search, he said, that fuelled the explosion of web content and, unsurprisingly, Gomes doesn't see social data as a replacement for search but as a layer that accesses the information in a different way.
"We saw a symbiotic evolution of the web and search because people could find what they wanted more easily," said Gomes, who joined Google in 1999. "We see social as a layer in search that provides you with more relevant information in certain situations, so if you were looking at product ! reviews, those of your friends would be marked in the results. But the most important thing in search is still the search term, and how your computer understands that."
Though Google+ is an intelligent attempt at a social networking tool, it seems a typical Google product in that it is brilliantly, heavily engineered but lacks the human focus required for a social network the fuel that has propelled Facebook to 750 million users.
With data from so many consumers informing so many Google products, why isn't there more personalisation? "In most cases 'personalisation' just means giving you what you wanted in the first place," said Gomes. "If two friends search 'malt' but one likes beer and one whisky, they will see different results. And if that kind of personalisation didn't work, you'd just think search was broken."
The issue of personalised search results based on our browsing history has become contentious. With news, for example, how can users be presented with an objective view of a story from multiple sources if Google serves up sites or perspectives that the user is known to like? "Diversity of results is something deeply baked into the algorithm tools we use, so that we hopefully give a broad perspective," said Gomes. "But if you are interested in a topic you'd tend to do a very specific query anyway, and our first goal is to give you the information you want."
Facebook rigidly maintains that social context is historically and socially relevant. "Anthropologically, we have been informed and influenced throughout time by the people around us, and that's equally true on Facebook as it is offline," said Facebook's advertising chief, David Fischer. "Now we look at the networks people communicate in
"There are important opportunities for marketers in getting their messages out through those friends and family connections. The social graph contains not just people, but brands, universities [and] institutions that people chose to connect to."
This network of social, professi! onal and commercial relationships may have always existed, but it is their accessibility as expressed online that is unprecedented. One of Facebook's biggest successes and a strategy Google has strictly enforced on Google+ has been encouraging real names on to the site, making its network and data far more valuable. This is creating a living record, said Fischer, and building it in a meaningful way. "There's no decision that a person takes in their lives that is not a better decision when it is informed by the people around them that they trust."
Several hundred research scientists at Google are studying how web users access, interact with and share information. How will Google refine its mission of organising the world's information? "We often see the future already exists in the present in some form, so the things just getting interesting now will be very important," said Gomes.
He describes a relationship where users expect Google to synthesise answers from different sources to provide an expert response and expects the most noticeable changes to be made to the mobile homepage, which can take advantage of multiple sensors such as location to provide "richer interaction models". That might include speech recognition already vastly improved from even two years ago and localised artificial intelligence that improves suggestions as it learns about the user.
Gomes claimed that instant access to information through Google has made conversations smarter, citing the time he went to see Kafka's Metamorphosis and read up about the production. "My experience of the play was richer and I took away more because the combination of me plus the internet made me seem like someone who, in the past, would have been regarded as an expert. I became the kind of person I would previously have looked up to."
Yet though Google and Facebook are both keen to burnish their scientific credenti! als, ult imately the real battle is over cold, hard cash. Google made 97% of its revenues, or $32.3bn, in the past 12 months from advertising. eMarketer, meanwhile estimates that Facebook's largely ad-generated revenues will grow from $0.74bn in 2009 to $5.74bn in 2012 yet the site has hardly begun rolling out truly personalised, targeted advertising. If there is any of Google's lunch to be eaten, it is here.
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