Google fails to give relevant search’s, says Facebook executive

Google and other search engines are not giving consumers exact enough searches, according to Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook’s Platform Partnerships.

Talking to The Telegraph in 2011, Beard claims that search engines need to ‘go social’ and allow consumers to access ‘friend referrals’, as the power of recommendations is much more effective for ecommerce.

Whether Facebook will provide that information to its rival Google is unclear. Yet Beard, stressed the importance of social recommendations for products bought online.

“Friend referrals are a really powerful way to discover information and search is another way of discovering information and layering the two together seems like its going to be a significant improvement over keeping them apart,” he said.

Beard, formerly, Google’s director of Social Media, now heads up Facebook’s Platform Partnership development. This section of the site allows other websites to integrate Facebook apps or tools, such as the Like button onto their website.

Developers also use Facebook’s social graph and data to create socially driven services and games, for example, the popular Facebook game Farmville.

The integration of Spotify is another example of how Facebook is working with other sites.

Beard says that search engines need a more social angle so that consumers can buy on the recommendations of their most trusted sources – their friends, as well as links to sites where they can buy the item.

Speaking about his own personal experiences with ecommerce, Beard said,

“Before the internet you would ask your friends for all your recommendations… then along came ecommerce and products like Amazon… which are great for buying or getting a product, but they don’t have any people on them so the discovery mechanism has now kind of been busted for a lot of things.”

“We think that through social and bringing people back into these applications is going to change everything.”

“Ecommerce is just one example – I got on the plane to fly to Europe and was sick of my luggage… and went into a search engine to look for a new bag. I tried everything and it just didn’t work. You can’t search for a piece of luggage just using search if you want the perfect one…I know I have a friend somewhere who does the same amount of travelling and knows the perfect bag for me… and that one recommendation is exactly the one that I want – but it doesn’t show up in search.”

However, despite Beard’s acknowledgement that search engines are not providing him with his travel needs, a deal between Google and Facebook would be unlikely as he agreed that it wouldn’t make good business sense.

Tags: facebook, google, news, social media

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