There’s no doubt Facebook’s explosive growth in the last couple of years has envied many Internet heavyweights including the likes of Google and Microsoft. Google, in particular, has been leaving no stone unturned to take on Facebook in this high stakes battle for supremacy in the social search segment.

While Facebook chose to side with Microsoft and chose the Bing route for embracing social search, Google on the other hand is now encouraging  users to connect to their Twitter accounts when they conduct searches. This rivalry gains all the more significance as it’s not just Facebook vs. Google, it’s actually a battle of the mighty four – Google + Twitter vs. Facebook + Bing.

The online search giant has been recently under the legal scanner for allegations raised by e-commerce websites that compete with Google that they are being treated unfairly. Social search has been widely predicted as the next big thing on the Internet, so I’m not surprised that Facebook and Google aren’t prepared to concede an inch in this all important battle.

Facebook Patents Social Search

Facebook has never been vocal about its social search ambitions. Last week, the world’s leading social network was awarded a patent that covered essential elements of social search. Dubbed as the “Curated Search”, the patent is about

“Search results, including sponsored links and algorithmic search results, are generated in response to a query, and are marked based on frequency of clicks on the search results by members of social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation from the member who submitted the query. The markers are visual tags and comprise either a text string or an image.”

Though it’s tough to make complete sense out of the above text, it’s evident that Facebook is trying to leverage the number of clicks and degrees of connection within its network to determine search results relevance.

Facebook and Microsoft – Made for each other?

Microsoft announced its entry into the social search game by partnering with Facebook to gain more access to Facebook data like friends, status updates and Likes. Though Microsoft already has a dedicated social search-only feature, it has failed to gain widespread public interest.

Facebook already partners with Microsoft for the latter’s social search efforts. Therefore, it would be interesting to see if Facebook plans to transform its social search patent into a product? It would be interesting to see if the world’s leading social network decides to leave Microsoft and go alone to take on the might of Google.

Either way, the battle for social search looks to be a two-horse race with Microsoft waiting by the sidelines.

Google – The Big Daddy of Social Search

Facebook may be a 700 million community but Google is still by all means, the Big Daddy of Social Search. Google already derives a whopping $25 billion in search advertising revenue. Further, it already has a diverse portfolio of social search tools. There’s personalized search which shows content shared or posted by a user’s friends. Google already integrates Twitter results into “Real time search”.

Further, Google says it plans to launch several new “Google Labs” offerings in order to improve the social search experience.

Do you think social search will be the next big thing on the Internet? Do you think Facebook can beat Google with its social search game plan? Please share your opinion by leaving a comment below this post.