Facebook Platform director Ethan Beard has said that search engines are failing to provide worthy results to people, and that they must go "social".
Beard’s remarks were mainly directed to search engine and rival Goolge. Recently, Google launched its social networking site Google+. The company has also said that it would integrate its social networking service with its search engine.
Google dominates the search market, while Facebook is the leader in the social networking sphere.
Beard told The Telegraph that search must "go social."
Beard cited an example: "Before the internet you would ask your friends for all your recommendations…then along came ecommerce and products like Amazon… which are great for buying or getting a product, but they don’t have any people on them so the discovery mechanism has now kind of been busted for a lot of things.
"We think that through social and bringing people back into these applications is going to change everything."
"Ecommerce is just one example – I got on the plane to fly to Europe and was sick of my luggage… and went into a search engine to look for a new bag. I tried everything and it just didn’t work. You can’t search for a piece of luggage just using search if you want the perfect one…I know I have a friend somewhere who does the same amount of travelling and knows the perfect bag for me… and that one recommendation is exactly the one that I want – but it doesn’t show up in search," said Beard.
However, he also stated that it is unlikely that his company and Google would have any sort of partnership. He said, such a decison would not make good business sense, despite the benefits to consumers.
Beard said, "I think search will go social,,.but I don’t know if I am smart enough to answer that specific answer …friend referrals are a really powerful way to discover information and search is another way of discovering information and layering the two together seems like its going to be a significant improvement over keeping them apart."
