Website Hype

It seems that there is considerable competition between Facebook and Google of late, with the two falling over themselves to sign up the best and the brightest in terms of developer talent, and the two virtually neck and neck in terms of the online advertising race. And when it comes down to it, it seems that it is Facebook that can’t really do without Google, indeed Facebook is now advertising on Google - to get advertising.

Facebook will soon be announcing that some of their pages that don’t require login will become indexable by search engines such as Google, so information that normally you would have to be logged in to get, will now become more publicly available. This follows on from the fact that recently Facebook launched a public listings search, whereby anyone can now search for a specific person.

It is argued by some that social networking sites, though extremely popular, have an inherent difficulty in making money, people don’t really go to them to search for information or look at ads, but to communicate with other users, so Facebook is perhaps having to work hard to monetize the site effectively.

Back in the summer Facebook signed an advertising deal with Microsoft to put Microsoft adCenter sponsored links and other ads on the Facebook site, right through to 2009. This news raised eyebrows because it was Microsoft that was chosen for the ad deal and not Google, which is surprising given that Google has been going all out for the big advertising deals, even offering 90% or more of total revenue to certain big name partners, such as AOL and Ask.

So what does the future hold for Facebook in terms of its relationship with Google? Let’s see.