Facebook’s challenge to Google: as predicted

A brief piece of trumpet blowing, if you’ll excuse me. The BBC and others are running stories today about how Facebook’s takeover of FriendFeed is making it into a serious challenger to Google. And a quick rustle through the archives on this site gives this from earlier in the year:

A bigger risk, though, [to Google’s dominance] is that people move to using search services built into other services which are beyond Google. This is what was happening with YouTube – until Google purchased it. YouTube has become the second most popular search site on the internet, after Google itself. It may only return video results, but its content is so popular that people are often happy to only be searching that, leaving the rest of the internet alone.

With YouTube, Google’s money snuffled out the threat. But why shouldn’t search migrate in future to another site stuffed full of content? And if that other site, having captured people’s attention with the ability to search its own content, started adding in search results from the wider internet…

Consider social networks, which now account for 1 in every 10 UK Internet visits and 1 in every 5 page views. How widely used will that Facebook search box become?