FACEBOOK  VS  GOOGLE  

While Facebook is a social network and Google a search engine, both companies make money from advertising, and they're both battling for the same advertising dollars, for mindshare of the same users to view the ads, and ultimately for ownership and control of the same raw ore that makes network companies work, or not: information.

Facebook knows who is connected to whom. That's its core value. That social data can be used to build a more socially-aware search, and Facebook is doing just that in partnership with Microsoft and Bing.

Google is working on keeping its search ahead of Facebook in both social and traditional areas. Its "Search Plus Your World" feature integrates social signals into search. Google doesn't have the depth of social data that Facebook does, but this product does show that the search company can incorporate highly personal social data into search. At the same time, Google continues to push hard on improving plain old keyword search.

Its biggest deal to date was the IPO of Google . In light of investors' disappointment in Facebook'sabysmal debut, we thought it was a good time to chat with an experienced banker who's providing an alternative to the traditional system.

Google Display Network vs. Facebook Advertising

(advertising accounts for 96% of Google’s revenue vs. 86% of Facebook’s)

To be perfectly clear, we’re not comparing Google vs. Facebook as companies per se. Google is a search engine, and Facebook is a social network. This is a specific comparison of the display advertising capabilities of Facebook against only the display advertising component of Google's business (The Google Display Network), which makes up roughly 20% of Google’s total advertising business. The Google Display Network allows advertisers to place contextual ads on a network of sites across the Internet (including Google properties like YouTube, Blogger and Gmail as well as over 2 million other participating sites), rather than in the search results.