Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has some big aspirations. The social network wants to usurp Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) as the king of search, according to comments made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on this week’s earnings call (noted by Business Insider‘s Jim Edwards).
Facebook calls out Google
Zuckerberg actually said they would be taking on Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) for dominance in the search business. He also pointed to three things which he says illustrates exactly how they are moving in this direction.
According to the Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) executive, they actually have a larger data index than any of the other search engines. In addition, he said their artificial intelligence division continues to work on Graph Search—Facebook’s own search engine—so that their data can be made available to users through it. And third, he said when the product is complete, they will be rolling it out to mobile devices so that users are able to use voice recognition on their smartphones to ask Facebook for solutions to problems and advice.
Facebook’s efforts to take a decade
At least Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) doesn’t plan on dethroning Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) overnight. He said their efforts will take about ten years to complete.
Zuckerberg made the comments when someone asked him about Graph Search, which currently is rather clumsy and hasn’t received such glowing reviews. Currently Graph Search is meant to help users find answers to questions which might not have fixed or obvious answers. For example, someone might ask it, “What are my friends’ favorite restaurants.” Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG), on the other hand, wouldn’t necessarily have this data, plus it specializes in questions which have definite answers.
According to the Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) CEO, their first version of Graph Search indexed over a trillion connections between people, interests and events. The second version covered all of the updates people had made since the first version was released.
Facebook’s search might be more personal
As Edwards of Business Insider notes, Zuckerberg’s comments suggest that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s search will provide more personalized results, particularly since he called Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) and its competitors “web search engines.” He could be suggesting that Google is limited to web browsing, while Facebook’s search results could either be separate from or up against Google’s search results.
