Social Networks Have Potential to top Search Engines

While search engine companies continue to compete against each other in order to be the most widely used, news reports speculate that they should be looking out for another form of competition—the social network. In the past, players such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL have dominated search. But the social media wave that has risen as of late has brought forth many innovations in which users do not have to leave a social network to say, surf the web, instant message, share photos and videos or even shop. As social networks continue to evolve, will users leave search engines behind? What are search engines doing to remain relevant?

Users currently have many opportunities for surfing the web without leaving their social networks. Facebook and Myspace are doing this through applications. For example, Business Week reports that a “partnership with Amazon.com… has produced a shopping application that lets users buy items at Amazon without leaving Facebook’s site, while tapping opt-in ‘news feeds’ that broadcast activities on Amazon, such as product reviews and wish list updates, to Facebook friends. Additionally, users can use the Facebook search option to search either within Facebook or on the web.

Nevertheless, search engines are not standing back. They are incorporating features such as OpenID onto their websites (MSN has particularly done so with Windows Live). Users “register with a standard username and password, and find their experiences instantly enriched by friends’ lists, profiles, reviews, ratings, and feeds. In essence, it’s a way to bring social context to sites that have no social media components of their own”.