During Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s secret announcement, its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, explored the massive size of the company. He said more than one billion active users of the social networking site have uploaded a whopping 240 billion photos and have made over a trillion connections.
The company announced that it has touched a billion active users mark in October, 2012. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is the most widely used digital service now. Text messaging, VoIP, email, IM services are all left far behind. However, the social networking site has suffered in the past few weeks. Maybe its long-term users are now looking for some new experience.
On an average, a normal Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) user would have about a thousand connections and 200 images uploaded. Of course, millions of active users have made connections and uploaded photos. Still, Facebook has a massive amount of data in its website.
Now the company will use the same data to make money. In the same event, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a search feature called “Graph Search.” With this, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has geared up for a direct competition with Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG), the world’s largest Internet search engine. The Graph Search also has the potential to generate revenues for Facebook.
Zuckerberg says there are three ways to get information: Timeline, News Feed and Graph Search. The News Feed tells you what’s going on around you in the world. Timeline helps you learn about people. And Graph Search will show the users’ private information which is not available on the web. He reiterated that it’s different from web search.
The Graph Search will not show you the links to the information. It will return the answer. It will be more oriented towards facts like where your friend checked-in while staying in San Francisco, or where he worked. However, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) basically gives subjective answers or opinions, not such facts. So, the two giants will not be competing directly. But they will eat up into each other’s businesses for sure.