The New Search War: Google vs Facebook

An interesting article on Mashable.

Google still gets more than twice as many visitors as Facebook, but how might that change if Facebook and the new engineering additions from team FriendFeed figure out how to slice and dice that user data in real-time? No one has yet really cracked the real-time or social search egg, but if Facebook can do it, its approximately hundreds of millions of monthly visitors could become hundreds of millions of monthly searchers – and that’s very monetizable and very dangerous to Google’s core business.

And what of Microsoft? Let’s not forget that Microsoft’s Bing powers web search results on Facebook, already. What if the two companies mash it all together and Facebook’s real-time, social web search results find their way out onto Yahoo! (which will soon serve Bing search results)? That’s a very plausible eventuality, and another that’s very dangerous to Google.

Of course, considering how often Facebook is banned in places of businesses, I have to think that would be a serious handicap to competing with Google.