> "But they’ll never know what you want right now, and Google always does."
Matt, this appears to be your killer point, that search allows advertisers to know what you want right now. The limitation with search however is that there are things I am very likely to want that I don't search for.
Let me use an example. Often when people are about to go on holiday they announce it in Facebook by writing on someone's wall or updating status etc. Now if I said I was going to Cancun for example would't it be great for advertisers of tshirts, shorts and holiday insurance to advertise to me? Only Facebook can do this, Google cannot (I would have to do three separate searches, with FB I do nothing).
I think this goes beyond a friend recommendation because it links exactly to my plans. Its not only targeted but it shows what I want tomorrow. I think overall this is more targeted than google thanks to the demographic targeting placed on top which Google does not have. In Facebook, I could use the persons place of employment and age to work out their salary and offer two different holiday insurance schemes to the wealthy and the less fortunate. If I type in Holiday insurance in Google, advertisers cannot filter like that. And would think this likely to return a better ROI than Google search (as long as people pay attention to the ads! - the assumption being when ads are relevant people actually do).
So what I am saying is that there is a whole lot of data for Facebook to play with, don't rule them out yet. It will be very hard for them to pull this off but someone has to challenge the google monopoly and who are better placed than them.
I don't understand your logic. You type Cancun into Facebook and it hits you with "tshirts, shorts and holiday insurance". Why couldn't Google just do the same when you Googled for Cancun? That's not what Google does hit you with, but that's only because the market has decided that those ad slots should belong to travel agencies, etc. If ads ever took off on Facebook, it would presumably decide the same exact thing there.
I don't know about you, but like 99.9% of the population, when I travel to a new place I type it in Google first. I might type it into Facebook if I want to see if any of my friends will be there or have been there. But generally I'm Googling for what to do. It's gotten me through many new cities.
Also, you're giving Facebook too much credit for being able to parse natural language if you think this can scale for them. They might be able to target ads around specific keywords, but even that is going to be tough.
> "You type Cancun into Facebook and it hits you with "tshirts, shorts and holiday insurance". Why couldn't Google just do the same when you Googled for Cancun?"
That's the thing...with Facebook you don't have to search in order to be presented with relevent advertising. FB could parse natural language from the communications you are having with friends to display ads relevent to what you want now. Using my example above if i posted on my friends wall saying I am going to cancun then I would see the ads described above. However, that doesn't mean I woulnd't search in Google.
I agree, natural language parsing is very difficult but if Facebook could do that they may be on to a winner.
Even if the problem of generalized natural language understanding were solvable - which I doubt -, my bet would be on Peter Norvig and the Google team solving it way before the Facebook guys.
The fundamental problem is that natural language processing (NLP) isn't one problem to be solved. There will be many solutions to many particular problems of NLP. Many, many years later we're still waiting for one solution to energy (steam, or coal, or nuclear...?) or one solution to flight (gliders, or jets, or rockets...?). Human intelligence is a swiss army knife where the tools developed millions of years ago (opposable thumbs) or evolved withing ten years (keyword-based search). Why should there be a general solution?
Google has taken a sizeable chunk. But what's interesting to me is search has become all-consuming for them. Many solutions are perfectly fine for search, but that perspective (aggregating large noisy datasets) won't help much in other areas (e.g., individual voice recognition). If anything it will be a big waste of time trying to shoehorn every NLP problem into that search-based rubric. That leaves a lot of room for little guys cranking through data to produce new, and unique, NLP tools (e.g., Dragon Naturally Speaking). More to your point: I have yet to see a scientific hire by Facebook away from Google. It's been all business and marketing from what I've seen in the popular press.
Why indeed. However, finding one was very much on the agenda for GOFAI, and remains on the agenda for various AGI efforts, e.g. by people like Pei Wang, Ben Goertzel, and Eliezer Yudkowsky (who comments here, as I've observed).
Matt, this appears to be your killer point, that search allows advertisers to know what you want right now. The limitation with search however is that there are things I am very likely to want that I don't search for.
Let me use an example. Often when people are about to go on holiday they announce it in Facebook by writing on someone's wall or updating status etc. Now if I said I was going to Cancun for example would't it be great for advertisers of tshirts, shorts and holiday insurance to advertise to me? Only Facebook can do this, Google cannot (I would have to do three separate searches, with FB I do nothing).
I think this goes beyond a friend recommendation because it links exactly to my plans. Its not only targeted but it shows what I want tomorrow. I think overall this is more targeted than google thanks to the demographic targeting placed on top which Google does not have. In Facebook, I could use the persons place of employment and age to work out their salary and offer two different holiday insurance schemes to the wealthy and the less fortunate. If I type in Holiday insurance in Google, advertisers cannot filter like that. And would think this likely to return a better ROI than Google search (as long as people pay attention to the ads! - the assumption being when ads are relevant people actually do).
So what I am saying is that there is a whole lot of data for Facebook to play with, don't rule them out yet. It will be very hard for them to pull this off but someone has to challenge the google monopoly and who are better placed than them.