The Social Search Network

By Brad

Over at GigaOm, Mathew Ingram speculates that while a rumor about Facebook getting into the online search business may not be accurate at the moment, it will be soon:

Facebook is already involved in search to a certain extent: the company did a deal with Microsoft last fall to add results from its network to the Bing search engine, and Blekko — the search engine startup launched by Rich Skrenta last year — also has a search that includes social results based on Facebook “likes” and other activity. But so far, Facebook’s involvement consists of allowing Bing and Blekko to crawl or index its data rather than doing so itself.

Google, meanwhile, made a big show of launching social and real-time search earlier this year, but the reality is that the majority of what those searches pull in (apart from Google-related social activity) is Twitter results. As Google knows, when it comes to real-time social information, Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla.

Later in the article, Ingram reveals some startling numbers about Facebook:

[U]sers spend 700 billion minutes a month on the site, and post 30 billion pieces of content, including likes and status updates and comments.

700 billion minutes each month? Wow.