Google and Facebook are two big players in their quest for information. While both are very popular, only one can be crown the king of mining and analyzing data. While Facebook provides you with ads that may be relevant to you, in my experience they miss the mark almost 75% of the time. I hardly receive ads that relate to my interests, and most of the time they are of ads about food. Ads for restaurants can be targeted to anyone, what Facebook is lacking are ads that target just me as an individual. Google on the other hand takes the similar approach of trying to show me ads that are relevant to me, but for Google, they seem to have a much better understanding of who I am. I have a routine in the morning when I wake up and I visit the same sites on a daily basis. This is how Google begins to track my patterns of search behavior. For example when I search “Nexus 7” into Google Search, the ads that are displayed on the right hand side shows ads of similar deals from retailers and online stores. Google is able to personalize my ads because they know that I usually spend some time researching these products on Google. So if I am looking up specifications for an android tablet then I will usually see ads for deals for these devices.

Google knows me as a user of their product, but Facebook seems to be trying to “guess” who I am.  Its like with a first date, if you had a dinner date with Facebook (figuratively), you figured out there were things you both liked, however you didn’t feel as though you were clicking as well as with your previous date with Google. Google seemed to take you off your feet when you found out Google can predict what activities you enjoyed. Facebook on the other hand, had to ask you 20 questions to get that one specific answer. “The one-identity problem isn’t a fundamental flaw, It’s more of a bug: Because Zuckerberg thinks you have one identity and you don’t, Facebook will do a worse job of personalizing your information environment.” – And this is somewhat true, when we are on Facebook our experience are limited to the activities of our friends in relation to us. So while its great that you can like certain pages, and posts on your news feed, it doesn’t tell much of a story. But Google can analyze you as though you had multiple personalities. Google can figure out that you love to teach, or that you love to read poetry, and that you also love to skydive and snowboard. With Facebook there is a beginning and an end, with Google, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the end Google is victorious when it comes to extracting our information in order for our experience to be more personalized.