Emerging Technologies

Social rank versus page rank

By Brij ⋅ July 6, 2007 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Social networks are strong contenders to take the title of Internet OS . Facebook with the brilliant platform strategy is leading the pack here. No longer one can write them off as just an aggregation of college kid profiles. It’s a fast growing ecosystem of relationships. Searching this relationship can be a potential goldmine. Check these stats shared by Facebook tech lead:

* Over 500 million searches per month. This makes us one of the top 20 search engines on the web in terms of number of searches.
* Approximately 1 terabyte of in-memory data.
* Average search query time of less than 100ms.
* Most used people search engine on the web

If you combine these stats with the wonderful search engine valuation math done here, you can come up with Facebook valuation in the upwards of many billions. Granted this search is not web search in the sense of Google or Yahoo, but its a start. As privacy issue continues to haunt Google, these upstarts will eat into search market by approaching it from the people/profile search.

In a way Facebook social search is competing with Google homepage. Increasing focus on social relationship in how we conduct search and eventually commerce will likely lead the next round of evolution here. I believe Facebook and Twitter-kind of applications are very important innovation in that regard.

Update: It just struck me as a possibility. What if Facebook extends their platform API to allow all application developers to expose their application data to be part of this search result. Instead of searching music on Google, why not use Facebook which in turn can dip into iLike+Audio+(many more..) application data base. Now that will be a real deal !

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