There is an enormous deference between Search Ads (such as those in Google search results) and display advertising such as Facebook and Googles Display Network.
I assure you Google are paying Apple to be the default search engine exactly because it's basically a licence to print money.
It has nothing to do with display ads.
If Facebook had a search engine they would bid against Google for that role, but as it appears to be the case there is a Google/Facebook gentlemens agreement to not compete in that area.
Well yeah, Google tried to build a social network (actually several) and failed; Facebook didn't try to build a search engine - that wouldn't fit into their business model of sucking you in and driving you to sign up to Facebook. I mean, after they bought Oculus, they even started requiring a FB account to use the device, but they couldn't have done that for a search engine, nobody would have used it. But lots of others did, and failed (or at least couldn't compete with Google).
So we can conclude that neither building a successful social network nor building a successful search engine is easy :)
but fb does have a search engine? Admittedly it only searches for content on their own site, but as you note the strategy has been to make the walled garden so expansive that users would never want to leave (or be able to --- see India). Building a general purpose web search engine would be to give up on the "own everything" strategy.
Yet Google tries really hard to get you to log in, to the point where if you log into the browser to be able to sync your bookmarks and settings, you will be logged into your Google search as well.
>There is an enormous deference between Search Ads (such as those in Google search results) and display advertising such as Facebook and Googles Display Network.
I assure you HN does not understand anything about Ads. Ever since I realise HN had some deep misunderstanding with Online ads, I have been stating this difference for over 3 years. The only thing I got on HN was all ads are evil. Targeting Ads, Tracking Ads, Search Ads, or the latest buzzword surveillance capitalism.
>FB could surely muster the engineering resources to create a search engine that matches what Google has today.
I wouldn't be so sure. Bing is an excellent counter example to that statement. And not just because (from my experience) it doesn't produce the same quality of results. It's also about user adoption. MS built a reasonable, if not clearly superior alternative to Google and spend enormous sums of money marketing it, making it the default option on the default browser installed on millions of new PC's each year, and is has single-digit market share.
Facebook doesn't have those inroads on the PC market to leverage. They'd have to build something so much better than Google that it would make Google look like Yahoo when Google first arrived on the scene. At which point Google could probably stop sandbagging their own search efforts that favor ads space over results and make up any lost ground pretty quickly.
I'm also not confident in Facebook's ability to create high quality new products anymore. The most recent big successes have come from acquisitions. I suppose they might be able to buy DDG, but they'd almost immediately lose all of its users. And unless the still wanted to build their own actual engine, they'd have to rely on the goodwill of MS to continue getting most results via Bing's engine.
I assure you Google are paying Apple to be the default search engine exactly because it's basically a licence to print money.
It has nothing to do with display ads.
If Facebook had a search engine they would bid against Google for that role, but as it appears to be the case there is a Google/Facebook gentlemens agreement to not compete in that area.