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"Google owns search, but Facebook owns you. Which is more valuable for selling advertising?" I disagree with this frame and this his implicit answer. Facebook

"Google owns search, but Facebook owns you. Which is more valuable for selling advertising?" I disagree with this frame and this his implicit answer. Facebook's advertising model is sort of inherently adversarial. Their ads have to distract you to be successful. That means there's always a tension between user experience of the product and the revenue stream. Google's meaningful innovation was capturing your intent, so that it can give you relevant ads when you're actually looking something, often to buy. All the social stuff is in service of making that relevance part better, but it's an inherently more constructive model of advertising. I think it also works a lot better, and is much harder to replicate than Facebook's.

dcurtis 14y ago
I completely agree with you, which is why the very next sentence is, "I think the next generation of finding things on the internet is going to require the use of both ends of the spectrum..." You need both intent and relevance. Intent comes from search, relevance comes from you and your social graph.
- joebadmo 14y ago
  I agree with a lot of what you're saying, too. E.g. I think your insight into Google's main challenges being design problems and the "Innovator's Dilemma"-type of problems that Google has now are very significant. Personally, I would have preferred Google to have gone in a different direction, pushing more open protocols and standards, letting the Web bloom entire rain forests and sorting through those jungles for the rest of us. Creating yet another silo seems like "now you have three problems". But I don't really see how Facebook's any better off. I sort of see now that you were just responding to Page's sentiments, it seemed a bit one-sided.
  - zaidf 14y ago
    The fun will begin when facebook uses Bing's index and their UI/engineering expertise to launch a _serious_ Google search competitor. I for one am ready, though I think facebook will probably take another few years before getting to it.
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  Does anyone have any idea how much traffic Bing gets from their integration in the facebook search? Would be interesting to know on what scale they are already capturing this type of intent & relevance search traffic. I'm guessing from the fact they integrated web search back in 2008, and it's not been made more prominent since, not a huge amount.
karpathy 14y ago
Disagree. Users are most vulnerable when they are bored, staring at their feed for last 5 minutes and with nothing else to do or look at, not when they are actively engaged with a specific intent. That's when the ad gets in the way.

dcurtis 14y ago

I completely agree with you, which is why the very next sentence is, "I think the next generation of finding things on the internet is going to require the use of both ends of the spectrum..." You need both intent and relevance. Intent comes from search, relevance comes from you and your social graph.

joebadmo 14y ago
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, too. E.g. I think your insight into Google's main challenges being design problems and the "Innovator's Dilemma"-type of problems that Google has now are very significant. Personally, I would have preferred Google to have gone in a different direction, pushing more open protocols and standards, letting the Web bloom entire rain forests and sorting through those jungles for the rest of us. Creating yet another silo seems like "now you have three problems". But I don't really see how Facebook's any better off. I sort of see now that you were just responding to Page's sentiments, it seemed a bit one-sided.
- zaidf 14y ago
  The fun will begin when facebook uses Bing's index and their UI/engineering expertise to launch a _serious_ Google search competitor. I for one am ready, though I think facebook will probably take another few years before getting to it.
dazbradbury 14y ago
Does anyone have any idea how much traffic Bing gets from their integration in the facebook search? Would be interesting to know on what scale they are already capturing this type of intent & relevance search traffic. I'm guessing from the fact they integrated web search back in 2008, and it's not been made more prominent since, not a huge amount.

karpathy 14y ago

Disagree. Users are most vulnerable when they are bored, staring at their feed for last 5 minutes and with nothing else to do or look at, not when they are actively engaged with a specific intent. That's when the ad gets in the way.