San Francisco — Rapidly growing social-networking site Facebook is giving a nagging pain to search engine behemoth Google Inc., and starting this fall, the Silicon Valley search engine titan plans to gradually infuse its core products with elements of social networking features, reviving attempts to directly compete with Facebook and its 500 million users after pulling the plug on its stillborn Wave project, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt.
Addressing reporters Tuesday at the Google Zeitgeist conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., Schmidt said Google expects to at least gain access to Facebook users’ contact lists so that people can expand their social network on Google.
“The best thing that would occur for Facebook is to open up its data,” Schmidt said. “Failing that, there are other ways to get that information.” He declined to be specific.
He said, without elaborating, that Google’s products would integrate more social-networking elements later this year. The search engine leader intends to introduce “a social layer” into its existing collections of online search, video and mapping products, rather than unveil a flashy product. To thrust that effort, he intends to sustain its pace of acquisitions. For months, Google has been making acquisitions and recruiting talent for the secretive project dubbed “Google Me.”
“We are attempting to take Google’s core products and add a social component,” Schmidt told a select group of reporters at Zeitgeist, a gathering of business partners and high-profile industry figures.
“If you think about it, it is obvious. With your permission, knowing more about who your friends are, we can deliver more tailored recommendations. Search quality can get better.”
Google has relentlessly toiled to find the right touch in creating the types of social networking services that have become increasingly hot online.
It announced the termination of Wave this year, a high-profile online communications tool launched last year. And Orkut, its early online social network, which has failed to catch traction on outside of Brazil and India.
The transition will become effective during the fall of this year, Schmidt said today at a press briefing in Arizona. The remarks followed comments by a Facebook executive that Google was building a new social-networking site.
The company is attempting to catch-up with Facebook, the top social-networking service, which surpassed Google as the most- visited U.S. website earlier this year. Weekly visitors at Facebook obscured Google for the first time in March, according to Experian Hitwise.
“Facebook is the leader in the budding social Web,” said Ray Valdes, an analyst at Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner Inc. “Google is Facebook’s most direct competitor, because Google is dominant in the previous generation of the Web, the content-centric Web.”
The speculation escalated in August when the search engine leader has increased its pace of acquisitions, partly to shore up social features, acquired Angstro, a company that organizes news for social networks, and hired its co-founder Rohit Khare. A few weeks earlier, Google paid $182 million for Slide Inc., an Internet startup that owed much of its success to building applications for Facebook. Google also recruited Max Levchin, Slide’s chief executive and a co-founder of PayPal Inc., to help lead its social media efforts.
But it was not until Tuesday that Schmidt, addressing to a group of reporters in Arizona, he said that more users are spending time on Facebook — to share links, videos and updates — means less activity on the open Internet, which is Google’s main playing field.
Because of that, analysts have said, Google is impatient to establish itself — and its $20-billion online advertising business — in the social sphere. Media reports now categorizes search engine giant as developing a new social networking product called “Google Me” in an attempt to take on Facebook, which has more than half a billion users worldwide. Others speculate it might be looking for an acquisition to get into social gaming.
“Everybody has convinced themselves that there is some huge project about to get announced next week. And I can assure you that is not the case,” Schmidt said.
So far, the Mountain View, California-based company, has made more than 20 purchases in 2010, compared with about five deals last year, according to Bloomberg data.
A Facebook spokesman did not immediately have a comment.