Mediarun Search Marketing News

Facebook buys search engine start-up

August 17th 2010

Search Engine Optimisation News

Never one to be outdone by Google, social networking website Facebook has stepped back into the search engine fray, snapping up start-up Chai Labs.

As Google continues to cement its position in the search engine marketplace - not least with suggestions that it is to buy visual search specialist Like.com for a cool £64 million - Facebook is determined not to be outclassed.

The wranglings of the two online giants will have a number of far-reaching effects, but the impact on SEO agencies and search engine optimisation marketing specialists is likely to be tangible.

Facebook's acquisition of Chai Labs is a natural move for the social media firm. As it continues to improve its services, and grow its user base, overhauling its search function would not only boost user experience but potentially create new revenue streams for the company - particularly if Facebook was to introduce a Google Adwords-equivalent.

The social networking website is already seen as a stand-alone web 2.0 portal that does not rely on Google to drive traffic to its site and the acquisition of a search engine specialist will only reiterate Facebook's independence.

So what could this mean for SEO companies?

Well, social networking sites are already seen as a key marketing tool for search engine optimisation experts and their use is often closely integrated into search engine marketing strategies. But, as Facebook becomes more self-contained, SEO agencies could begin to compartmentalise marketing strategies, separating social media and search engine optimisation once more.

If people begin searching for products, brands and special offers on Facebook in suitably large numbers, search engine optimisation on the site is going to come into its own. And if the technology underneath the Facebook bonnet is different from that used by other leading search engines then marketers will have to make sure their marketing strategies differ from their other website optimisation campaigns.

The takeover of Chai Labs has cost Facebook around £640,000, but whether this investment will be recouped by the company remains to be seen. And only time will tell if Facebook uses its new semantic search engine - which incorporates "proprietary crawling, artificial intelligence and data mining technologies to analyze and extract insights from millions of real-time data points across the web" - to dethrone Google.

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