It's clear Facebook's new Graph Search is a direct blow to Google. It was created by a team of former Googlers and Facebook is using MicrosoftBing as its backup for Web searches.
While Google dominates the search market, Google+ has done little to steal Facebook's social market share.
Facebook's Graph Search, if executed properly, will be more useful than Google searches when it comes to finding personalized results and trusted recommendations. And it will do it all using data Google's search engine can't touch.
"People use search engines to answer questions,” Mark Zuckerberg told Wired's Steven Levy. “But we can answer a set of questions that no one else can really answer. All those other services are indexing primarily public information, and stuff in Facebook isn’t out there in the world — it’s stuff that people share. There’s no real way to cut through the contents of what people are sharing, to fulfill big human needs about discovery, to find people you wouldn’t otherwise be connected with. And we thought we should do something about that. We’re the only service in the world that can do that.”
Levy explains the difference between Facebook's and Google's search engines further:
Graph Search is fundamentally different from web search. Instead of a Google-like effort to help users find answers from a stitched-together corpus of all the world’s information, Facebook is helping them tap its vast, monolithic database to make better use of their “social graph,” the term Zuckerberg uses to describe the network of one’s relationships with friends, acquaintances, favorite celebrities, and preferred brands.
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