Can Facebook out-Google Google? The competition is mounting between the Web’s two largest destinations as Facebook unleashes a string of new features. Set to debut at Facebook’s April 21 developers conference, they may lay the groundwork for reorganizing the Internet according to the relationships between people instead of pages—with massive implications for both search and advertising.
Back when the Web was simply pages we clicked through on our laptops, Google was king of search, serving up the most relevant and popular Web destinations. It still does the best job of any single search engine at turning up what we want, and it’s constantly refining its algorithms to give us the most relevant results based on our past searches. So when a colleague and I both plugged “Heidi Klum” into our Google search boxes recently, my first three results were text links to articles while he received photographs of the supermodel. We showed these screens to Google Chief Economist Hal Varian during an interview last week, and he gave an approving nod: It was a successful result of the company’s massive endeavor to personalize and improve searches.
But as the Web becomes more dynamic, Google falls short.
Full story: Facebook vs. Google: Game On – Fortune Brainstorm Tech