Facebook Won’t Challenge Google, For The Time Being
Facebook Aren’t Factoring Web Search Into Their Short Term Plans
Facebook’s Director of Engineering, Lars Rasmussen, has teased the online community by claiming that major updates to the world’s largest social network will soon be made. Leading technological experts have suggested that he may be referring to the development of targeted advertising or extension of the mobile service. What we can be sure of is that Facebook are not planning to do battle with Google in the web search stakes any time soon.
Rasmussen said, “I can’t predict what will happen in the future but I don’t think it will make sense for us at this stage to even begin to think about doing web search. Google does that so well.” However, he didn’t mention whether Facebook were intending to further improve their internal search engine, which has already opened up the world of real-time search to the online community.
Google’s Link Messages Cause Worry And Confusion
In a continued attempt to combat black hat SEO Google have recently focussed their attention on the removal of ‘bad’ links. Following the identification of these unnatural and unethical links the Google technicians have sent out messages highlighting the need for “changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.”
Webmasters have had a hard time figuring out the specific links that the major search engine has deemed unethical. Google have urged site owners ‘not to panic’ and revealed that they’d taken ‘a another step towards more transparency and began sending messages when [they] distrust some individual links to a site.” They will not impose penalties on all sites with slightly questionable links. However, webmasters are now wondering where the line of penalisation has been drawn.
Google Is Still The Top Dog Of Search
A recent Comscore report revealed that the number of online searches is continuing to grow. However, there is a great discrepancy in the 11.4 billion searches made by people using Google and 2.7 billion made by people opting for Bing. Moreover, Google’s share of the search market has increased to 66.8%, while the slices enjoyed by Bing and Yahoo are 15.6% and 13% respectively.
Experts working for the smaller search companies have attempted to change the picture by adding a range of features to the platforms. Bing has launched a link disavowing service, which is likely to prove popular among webmasters who’ve been penalised by Google in recent times. Yahoo have enlarged their image database and launched a social TV app. However, the leading commentators have predicted continued Google dominance over the next few years.
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