Facebook announces websearch to rival Google's

Admittedly I've made up the headline "Facebook announces websearch to rival Google's", but is it really such an outlandish proposition? It's certainly attention grabbing, and why not? Google's websearch has basically remained the same product for 10 years. Any engineer at Google would debate this, but I doubt anyone would debate that the engineers at facebook have achieved a stunning mastery over big data sets and management of the social network. 

Based on the considerable "Big Data" and real-time data expertise at Facebook, would anyone really be surprised if such a headline surfaced? I'd find it quite a believable story: "Facebook announces intention to best Google at web search." It's hard to overstate the earthquake that such an announcement would send rumbling through silicon valley, and the entire world. In fact, what better way for Facebook to spend their $500 million in Goldman Sachs cash then acquiring promising engineers and technologies to directly attack Google's biggest Web cash cows: search and maps. Bloodying the nose of the competition by competing with their core value has always been Google's way: If an Operating System is of value, Google builds an OS. If mobile computing is of value, google builds a mobile OS, and it's own phone hardware. The day is going to come when a Google rival will compete with Google on Google's home turf: web search.