Facebook Search Bigger than AOL, Gaining on Ask

Just like Google did quite a few years ago, Facebook’s sustained growth may allow it to venture into areas where the social network wouldn't normally have too much in common with. The site is already the largest online photo host, by a significant margin and without even trying, and it is now making some significant advances in an area it only recently became interested in, search. Google and Facebook are already competing more and more for people's attention, though with rather different approaches, but search is the clear domain of the Mountain View giant.

Nestled in the latest comScore search report for January, is an interesting tidbit of information, Facebook search share of the US market has grown by 13 percent just from December to January. It's an impressive figure whichever way you look at it, even though, overall, Facebook search is minuscule compared to Google.

But when compared to other traditional, albeit small, players in the US search market, Ask Networks and AOL Search (technically Google since AOL outsources its search capabilities) it becomes very clear that Facebook is now a legitimate player in search as well. Users made 395 million searches on Facebook in January, a drop in the bucket compared to Google's 9.9 billion or even Bing's 1.7 billion. However, that's 20 million more searches than people made on AOL and less than half of the 574 conducted on Ask.

There are a few caveats, you can't really compare Facebook search to Google or AOL and Ask for that matter. People use Facebook search to find something within the site, something that sits very well with the social network which would like nothing more than to have people use Facebook for everything online. The site also adds 'external' search results but there aren't that many people that would use Facebook instead of a regular search engine. The social network's external search is powered by Bing so this may be a surprising boost to Microsoft's struggling search business. Whatever the future holds, it's clear that Facebook's new found emphasis on search is paying off.