The Search War continues
This week we saw yet another example of the continuing search war between the so called big fish of the industry.
The advent of social networking sites has brought about a new angle for search engines to think about.
MySpace was the first big social networking site to come about but in recent times the big mover in this area has been Facebook.
With more than 50 million users worldwide and a user base that is growing faster than great rival MySpace. It adds 200,000 new users each day.
Facebook is seen as the cooler way of blogging on the web, with the average user spending up to 3.5 hours a week using their personal space on the site. Emails have been replaced with messaging, and status updates allow the user to describe what they are up to or how they are feeling.
One other growth area within the social network of Facebook is the outlet of applications. Software programmers are able to freely launch their applications with audiences in the millions.
Microsoft's investment makes them a serious player in the growing market of social advertising.
User’s put a great deal of information onto these sites, which they hand over with great readiness, search engines believe this to be perfect for advert targeting to specific user’s on these social sites.
The value of Facebook is based on a 1.6% share of the firm being worth the $240m Microsoft paid for it. Microsoft and Google were in a bidding war for a slice of the firm and both companies have deep pockets.
This puts a value on Facebook of over $15 Billion, from Microsoft’s perspective anyway. Some have seen this bidding war as more of a personal battle than a business one.
