Facebook search expands — will it take on Google?
will it take on Google? — Facebook has added a new option for its search bar, allowing users to search for advertising pages. — This continues a steady creep in search options, which already includes tabs to search for people, groups, events and applications.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook has been widening its search bar all fall: it opened results up to the public web back in September 2007, and this latest addition extends the existing tabs for people, groups, events and applications to advertising Pages.
The move lands alongside Facebook's newly live self-serve social advertising system — ads creatable in minutes — which gives those searchable Pages a commercial purpose, and it comes during a bruising stretch for the company's ad ambitions, with Beacon drawing fire for publishing off-site activity without clear consent and independent developers turning fearful just six months after being courted publicly.
First-order effects
- Advertisers now have a native way for users to discover their Facebook Pages from the search bar, making the Page itself — not just the ad unit — a destination worth building out on the platform's new ad system.
- Users get one more vertical inside Facebook instead of leaving for a general-purpose engine when looking for brands and products represented on the site.
Second-order effects
- Every search tab Facebook adds keeps query volume and intent data inside its own walls rather than Google's, tightening the loop between its social graph, its ad system, and the audience it can price against outside engines.
- Google faces the question — raised but unconfirmed in coverage at the time — of whether a platform holding user attention and identity can route commercial discovery around web search altogether.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer search fragments from one web-wide index into per-platform discovery layers, each monetized by its own ad system, with the open web index relegated to what platforms choose to expose.
- That structure would eventually force a decision point over whether closed networks let crawlers in or license their graph data — the fault line between walled gardens and search incumbents.
The trend: Consumer internet search is splintering from a single web-wide index into platform-specific discovery surfaces, each wired directly into its owner's advertising business.