Who’s going to break through Google’s strong walls? Facebook?

August 14, 2009 | Sarah Chong

This is part of the series: Who’s going to break through Google’s strong walls? Covering the timeline of battles that Google is facing against 4 major companies Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and Apple.

Over the years, Google’s products have won praises and support from its users. Its products such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Map and Google Analytics have truly improved our lives in many ways. However, this success was not welcomed by some and in fact, has been envied by Google’s (many) rivals.

With Google getting stronger and better by the day, its competitors (notably Microsoft) are devising plans to take it down. If you have not been keeping yourself in the loop, here are the battles that Google is currently fighting:

Facebook

Real-time Search

Google has been working on its project codenamed Caffeine integrating real-time search, which is the next big thing with quick adoption by Facebook as well. Google is placing heavy emphasis on search accuracy, indexing and speed but is that enough to keep it unaffected by Facebook’s new search?

With the recent acquisition of FriendFeed, Facebook is armed with a team of ex-Google engineers that is very serious with its newly launched real-time search. It also has a whole load of user data to be used for its social search, which is potentially more powerful than link data from the web (Google’s current approach). Once Facebook get this whole search game right and monetize it, Google might lose a big part of its core business.

Facebook search goes Bing

As I have said earlier, Microsoft is not going to go about fighting this battle alone. It is gathering allies and Facebook is now one of them, rightly so with Facebook’s newfound search potential. Bing is powering web search results on Facebook and if they put their best together to reproduce a powerful search experience (possibly finding its way to both Bing and Yahoo sites), the hit on Google might be substantial.

Facebook catching up with Google

One reason why most would think that Facebook real-time integrated social search is no match to Google’s search is because of Google’s larger number of users. However, this past months we have seen Facebook closing up the gap in terms of unique visitors and visits. Adding up to the threat of Bing powering Facebook search, Google might have more to worry in the long term.