Make a Custom Facebook Landing Page - Video

Facebook Search to take over Google

Google has been king of the internet searching for several years now leaving competitors, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask in the dust. With 70% percentage internet searchers using Google, it is been considered the most widely used internet application, that is until now.  In the last 3 years a new world leader has emerged from the pack, Facebook. 

               

The launch of social websites like Facebook and MySpace created a new way for internet users interact with each other. Long past are the days of snail mail and rolodexes to keep up with your network, now people utilize online networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. TheFacebook.com started out as an exclusive college network and turned into “The Social Network” with over 500 million users joining over 620 million groups and using over 500 million applications. According to Internet World Stats, that’s 25% of the world’s internet users!

Since its creation in 2004 facebook has been increasing its market share of the entire world at a massive pace growing its user base by more than 20% a year with no signs of slowing down. The company is expanding its reach with applications such as facebook connect which enables facebook users to logon to third-party websites with their facebook profile.

As the internet becomes more social and facebook continues connecting every part of your internet experience playing your games, posting your thoughts, connecting with friends, signing-into other websites - facebook connect, sharing news links, sharing video links, and buying things - facebook market place. It only makes sense that facebook’s next venture to expand their services into internet searching.

Currently, facebook uses a search function limited to facebook.com materials and is only used when looking for events, people, groups, or items currently located/posted on facebook.  The facebook search covers 7 of the top 10 reasons people use the internet so why not go after number one, searching for information?

Let’s face it, google has a 70% market share for online searches and that isn’t going to roll over with their innovative strategies for searching and consumer retention combined with the number of additional free services. But if facebook search implemented an effective and fully functional search application, with 150 million users on their website a day with a 25% usage rate, they would capture ~2.5% daily visit share surpassing the smaller search engines in usage rankings. This could be done with a few months of planning and a snap of Mark Zuckerbergs fingers considering they make an estimated billion dollars a year and just received 1.5 billion dollars from investors.

As the jockeying for internet traffic continues, the scales are tipping toward facebook as the internet interaction becomes more social oriented. The question: Does facebook want to wage a war against the biggest internet company of the last decade? Something tells me by looking at the events surrounding Mark Zuckerberg’s rise to power, he isn’t afraid to step on any toes. I could see facebook’s first shots in  2012 as this would coincide with their interest in going public. An announcement of releasing "facebook search" prior to their IPO would likely catapult their stock prices through the roof. 

The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Blureach Web Design

Facebook & Twitter Content actually does affect SEO results!

According to Social Times, Marketing Times, and Search Engine Land, Google and Bing have both confirmed that links shared on both Twitter and Facebook do in fact affect search engine results. This has been a question that has not been definitely answered until now, and yet it still seems rather murky as to how the link sharing actually does affect the results. Google stated that it uses something called Author Authority to gage the SEO ranking of sites and Bing uses a similar metric called Social Authority. Both of these are based off of a Twitter user's "author quality".  The reason they can't use this same metric with Facebook is because they do not have acces to personal information on profile walls within Facebook.

Need a Logo? Host your own contest at 99designs!

If you are anything like me and don't have too much talent in the "graphics" department there are a handful of websites that you can use to find freelance designers. 99designs is a great experience because it allows you to enter the description of the design you need along with your budget. Then it's time to sit back for a few days and allow designers to design and upload dozens if not hundreds of designs for you to view and choose from. It is an interactive experience where you can rate your favorite designs and give feedback to the designers so they can tweak them based on your preferences. Once you decide on the winner, the cash is given to the designer and the rights to the design is given to you. It is a nice deal for the designers because it is free to enter, and it is a great deal for you because it is efficient and fast! Check out 99designs then head over to BluReach for a custom CMS based website!