Will Facebook kill Google?
By Mike Moran. Filed in Search Marketing, Social Media Marketing |Tags: Facebook, Google, social networking, twitter
Image via CrunchBase
I was asked this question in an interview the other day. It’s framed more provocatively than you or I might think about it, but interviews are like that. The answer was easy, because of the extreme nature of the question. Of course Facebook won’t kill Google. But I don’t say that because I somehow think Larry P has the jump on Mark Z.–instead, I say it because nothing kills anything…
TV was supposed to kill the movies, right? Didn’t quite happen. Or was it that TV was expected to kill radio? That didn’t happen, either. What did happen is that the way we use radio changed.
Burns and Allen, Gunsmoke, soap operas…they all started on radio and moved to TV, leaving radio with news, talk, and music, which seems like a perfectly good use of audio. We started listening to radio mostly in our cars rather than in our homes. Radio changed a lot, but it still isn’t dead.
Twitter killed blogging, right? OK, not exactly. Twitter did kill certain types of blogging. All those blog posts where someone commented on someone else’s post–those are dead because they are better done in Twitter. But blog posts that are a long form article won’t die until something else comes along.
So, no, Facebook won’t kill Google. But searches that could be better served by asking your friends will die. As each new technology comes along, it steals a piece of what the older technologies do. It steals tasks and it steals time. But it’s rare that a communications technology completely kills a predecessor. (Yeah, I hear you, 8-track tapes.) What usually happens is that we specialize—we use new things for what they are good at and we continue to use the old things for some of what we used them for before, but not everything.
Expect to see that with Google, too. And eventually, we’ll be asking whether something new will kill Facebook, and the answer to that will be “no,” also.
Thursday, April 21st 2011 at 3:33 pm |
Facebook doesn’t kill google for me (yet) because I do not use facebook to find relevant resources. When I search on facebook then its usually for people, but I can not work with the results they offer me in terms of resources. They just doesn’t seem to be as relevant as google provides them currently.
Friday, April 22nd 2011 at 3:26 pm |
Andreas, in her comment above, is absolutely correct. Google is a search engine and that will be where most people will go to find something that they are looking for. If anything, if people like Facebook, more people will use the internet which in the long run means more people will use the search engines.
Saturday, April 23rd 2011 at 8:29 pm |
Definitely its not true that facebook will kill google. Facebook provides you to enhance a good amount of contacts but it does not allow you information of any kind and on world’s any topic so fast and quick as google did.
:)
Tuesday, April 26th 2011 at 9:51 pm |
Sure, you can go to facebook to find your friends opinions or look to see what other people have said about the company. However, you won’t find as much raw information as you will on a Google search. That is one unique feature that facebook has not added yet.
Thursday, April 28th 2011 at 1:01 pm |
Facebook may kill twitter but it can’t google. There is no competition for google. Its a giant in the web world.
Saturday, April 30th 2011 at 8:27 am |
Yeah you’re right about all of the things you said. There is no such thing as killing, just specializing.
Saturday, April 30th 2011 at 8:52 pm |
i dont think so because facebook have no any type of search engine and people use only for communication.
but google have everything ,,
Monday, May 2nd 2011 at 12:08 pm |
Well I think Facebook,Twitter,Google is really different from each other.Google is a search engine,Twitter is for short status update and Facebook is a complete social network site where we can chat ,play games,update our status,ask questions,Join different groups.So you see they are very much different from each other.So i dont think popularity of one will harm another.