3 Realistic Reasons Why Google is Afraid of Facebook

Google is the Optimus Prime in search and advertising on the planet. Facebook, on the other hand is the best social network world ever saw. They appear to be two very different beasts on the surface, then why can’t they simply get along?

Google has recently announced its profit, $2.9 billion in first quarter of 2012, which is as much as Facebook’s revenue for the entire 2011. Yet Sergey Brin accused Facebook and Apple for tightly controlling the people and the internet as a whole.

So there is something with Facebook that Google is very afraid of, which has the capacity to shake Google’s entire business.

Here are the three things that make Google afraid of Facebook.

Facebook Knows Who You Are, to an Incredible Level of Detail

Google’s core business is nothing other than search ads. Its search advertising product offers targeting the audience by lication, languages and devices. That's useful information, especially for the advertisers, when they are selling something. But it would be nicer to also be able to target much deeper, the way they can on Facebook.

Facebook is able to use much of profile information (including your tastes) you've filled out over the years, to target the advertising you see on the website. This information allows Facebook to link its ads to a much finer set of users than Google's search ads currently does. That's why, even though its business is smaller, Facebook represents such a threat to Google. It's only a matter of time until Facebook expands its advertising scale by opening the equivalent of Google’s "AdSense" - self-service ads for any site, using Facebook's superior targeting capabilities. Or since Facebook controls a huge amount of internet traffic, it is not difficult for them to start a search engine based on the social signals. That actually goes directly after Google's core business.

Facebook Blocks Google’s Mission

Google’s mission is “to organize world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The company hates “closed ecosystem.” But if you see, Facebook is hardly searchable from outside Facebook. For example, you can easily import all your Gmail contacts whereas it is hard or not even possible to import the Facebook contacts. So any content created in Facebook is useless to Google. That is the main reason why Google launched Google+, a challenge to Facebook’s vision of a walled garden. Since the launch of Google+, Facebook has become more open, but not to the extent that Google wants.

Facebook’s Database; A Growing Fear to Google

Facebook has a huge and growing database about the users that Google just doesn’t have. The Google’s search users are not even the real users at all. They are not logged in or exchange any information. That is why Google is integrating everything with Google+. If Google is also able to build Facebook like “real-time” user database with the help of Google+, then it would become the unstoppable, but not any time soon.