Search Engine Optimisation Web Log (BLOG)
Editor: Matt Paines

| This News Blog is dedicated to bringing news, information and innovations targeting the Search Engine Optimisation industry.

Facebook has sights set on search engines

Facebook may already dominate the world of social networking, but now it is making the first tentative steps into the fiercely competitive search engine market.

The company recently launched a trial of a feature called Questions, which allows people to pose queries to the site's 500 million users.

So far, just a select group of Facebook members have received the service, but the firms says it will evolve over time.

If successful, it will go head-to-head with other services such as Yahoo Answers, Twitter and search engines such as ask.com.

Earlier this year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that the future of the web was one where friends, or what was a called a social graph, guided internet users online.

At the time this was seen as a direct challenge to the dominance of Google's automated search but many industry experts believe it is unlikely that services such as Questions can ever kill off the search engine giant.

One industry expert explained to the BBC that indexing and ranking the web is very expensive and Facebook has no skills in doing that.

But what they do have is social connections, which allows users to put out those questions to others who they trust, he added.

Other experts believe that, rather than challenging the established search engines, the aim of Questions is to enable Facebook to gather more information on its users. This data can then be used to target marketing and advertising.

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