Facebook has announced that it has made its first foray into the world of search, with the launch of its social search tool - Graph Search.
In what some in the industry are viewing as a potential challenger to search engine giants such as Google, the facility allows users to make “natural” searches of their friend’s shared content to unearth preferences such as their favourite films, restaurants, travel destinations etc while the integration of Microsoft’s Bing search will help to address any questions that can’t be answered on site.
The social media site’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that although he doesn’t expect droves of web users to head to Facebook for search, social search constituted the “third pillar” of the website following on from the newsfeed and timeline, before adding that Graph Search would: “help drive connections within the network between individuals and between companies and pages”.
Facebok Graph Search Beta-Test
Graph Search is currently available as a beta test, accessible from a blue banner at the top of every Facebook page, and Zuckerberg confirmed that it would be rolled out “very slowly”.
“We’re going to put an encouragement on the home screen of everyone’s account so that everyone has the chance to look through these tools,” he said.
What does Social Search mean for my Website?
While some analysts have been underwhelmed by the debut of Graph Search, others have argued that it is set to have a significant impact on search.
Popular review site Yelp, which provides user reviews and recommendations on anything from nightlife to local services, is said to have felt the ripple effect from Facebook’s search announcement, after shares plummeted by 7% on Tuesday in the wake of the news.
The effect of the Facebook social search function means that content – high value content that social users can share with their friends and something that encourages recommendations – is going to grow in importance. Real marketing initiatives, that have a brand story and add value to customer’s online experience, are going to replace old-school SEO methods of fooling search algorithms.
Social Search Has Been With Us a While
Much has been made of the Facebook foray into search, but it’s worth noting that Google has been looking at social trends and shares from the likes of Facebook and Twitter for a while now as part of its algorithm; social likes are one indicator that the content on the page is worth indexing and showing in the Google results. Google is losing market share to Bing and Yahoo too, as well as social searchers.
So the lines between social and search have already been blurred. Many see a battle brewing between Facebook and Google – one based on social search vs searching social. Google+ can be viewed in this light.
Google+ is more than Google’s attempt at a social network
Google+ cannot compete with Facebook as an active social network, but we should not be 100% convinced that this is why Google introduced it in the first place. Google wants the data that a Google+ profile can generate – so that they can serve required advertisements to you based on your likes – but a lot of the changes have been implemented with authentication of web pages at their core.
Google has a continual fight on its hands combating spam and rogue site listings; it’s a quality results issue.
Google+ Adds Authority to Web Pages
The SEO industry has manipulated links, which Google uses as a core part of their algorithm, so that poor websites can rank highly in search results. Google hates this and introduced Google+ - and the authorship markup – to make it more difficult to trick the algorithm.
Google+ is also encouraging websites to produce more content, published by named authors, which sees those articles get a bump in the search rankings ahead of other pages in the organic listings. This means that content articles – rather than say a product landing page for an eCommerce shop - are listed higher in the rankings.
Those eCommerce enterprises that can’t get to the top of search results organically will increasingly turn to advertising on Google’s AdWords platform, leaving the organic results for more content led results.
Google+ isn’t a failure; in many ways it is a shrewd business move by Google: It is a great way to quality control their own product and the results the search engine generates while simultaneously it is likely to increase the demand for their own advertising products, all the while hoping to make Facebook a little nervous.
Facebook has come back with Graph Search; the jury is still out about how it will work, but the certainty is that for success in search and social marketers need to stop thinking about outdated SEO tactics and embrace the new way of going about successful online marketing.
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