Google's advantage is that people use it to find things they want, including things they want to buy. A user who is searching for "hiking boots", for example, is valuable to an advertiser because they are actively seeking information to make a purchase, and a sponsored link might be exactly what they're looking for.

Conversely, people use facebook to chat to their friends. They don't use it much to make purchasing decisions. So advertising there is less valuable, because people aren't necessarily in a buying mood.

This is why facebook needs far, far more data on you as an individual - what you like, what your friends like - to advertise to you effectively. Because you're not telling it what you want - as you do with google - it has to guess based on what kind of person it thinks you are.

I'm sure facebook will have a lot of success with advertising - TV does okay, even though people aren't trying to buy things while watching their favourite shows - but I don't think they'll be beating google.

I totally agree with the fact that it will take a lot on Facebook's side to beat Google. And as you said, FB will need enormous amount of data to target end-user advertising. But I think FB today is probably the most-fed website on a daily basis. People/Businesse upload data on FB without thinking twice (lets keep aside the security issues for a moment)! So, I would not be surprised if FB succeeds in collecting enough data someday to provide targetted search as well as targetted advetising to the end-users

FB has great targeting technology, but horrible demographics/behaviorals for most advertisers; as @nudge points out, you're not catching people when they're thinking of a purchase, but you're also dealing with a population that has more time than money. FB advertising can be highly effective for recruiting participants for a community site (being a heavy FB user means you're into that sort of thing) but the lack of a clear bottom line value for such users means that such advertising will be undervalued.

Ya, and that is mostly because FB is not a dedicated search engine, it is rather a Social networking site. When people actually want to search for a product, they google it. If FB decides to jump into the dedicated search market, with all the information provided/liked by its users (including end-users as well as businesses), people might just start finding it an efficient way to search for products which are liked by others too; in other words people might start using it for reaching to the product they want to buy.

no