Why Facebook will beat Google and what Paris Hilton has to do with it

Search Engines’ holy grail is to serve relevant search results. Their livelihood depends on that. But what is “relevant”? On the road from textual search to semantic universal search, SE’s are trying to resolve the relevancy puzzle. Machine based database queries cannot truly decipher my human intentions. The popular example used for the “search intention” conflict is the Paris Hilton paradox. Am I searching for Paris Hilton the celeb or am I working on my travel plan for my vacation in France and trying to find a hotel?

So far, Google has tried to resolve the issue by analyzing my behavioral and geographic parameters and assuming they can make an educated guess about what I really want. Google can take into consideration a range of relevant data, such as whether I searching from France,  my search history and my online “habits”, given that I am logged in to my Google account when I do most of my searching. They know a hell of a lot about me from  – medical issues, to what I like to cook to which sports teams I probably root for. But unless I am logged into my Google account or Gmail, Google should not be nosing around in what I do online.

Many critics  accuse Google of building the world’s largest spyware. But relative to Facebook’s potential to enter the personal space of anyone with a Facebook account (is there anyone without one?), Google has only touched the behavioral data surface.

Consider our Paris Hilton dilemma once more. Google is forced to make a lot of (somewhat educated) guesses about what I am in search of, while Facebook is armed with a killer relevancy weapon – my Social Network data. Consider the type of data Facebook can access about me and track:

Have I recently connected with friends in Paris?

Am I a Paris Hilton Fan?

Are any of my friends her fan?

Have I recently searched for a related topic from the same tag cloud?

Did any of my close friends or family conduct such a search?

Is my girlfriend living in Paris?

Do I want to study French cooking?

Am I interested in travel applications or celebrity tracking applications?