Search is becoming social and the recent Aardvark acquisition by Google is a reinforcement of the trend.
A recent study by Compete finds that Facebook is driving more traffic (than Google) to content websites like Yahoo and MSN.
Even though Google is search leader, people are more relying on their social networks, the connections for useful content.
People are spending less time navigating the Internet on their own and are now navigating the Internet based on their friends’ recommendations or their friends’ activities.
For example, Google accounted for 21.3 percent of referrals to sites catering to movie fans, but Facebook was second with 12.4 percent. And in a video category, Google – which owns YouTube – was first with 22.9 percent, but Facebook was next at 12.7 percent. : via
Earlier, there was a fight for ‘starting point’, and now it’s about the ‘destination point’ as well (or rather, the middle ground?)
Will Google Buzz help Google achieve the ‘destination’ service as well? To me, it looks more like an attempt to bring crawlable content inside Google Datacenter and rely less on Facebook and Twitter for real time search.
What’s your opinion? If you are a webmaster, how important is SEO vs. SMO to you?
Wow, this is huge! It shows the drift in psychology of most users now, they don’t search for new and interesting content – they discover it, socially.
social media rocks…and all playesr are jumping into it like rediff started rediff page, google buzzz.
FB rocks… Google Buzz sucks ….
Social networking should be renamed either of these:
1) Anti-social networking
2) Social Not-working
Face to face socialising wins every time.
+100 lol