At first glance, asking if Facebook can beat Google is a bit like asking if a penguin could beat an aardvark. Beat it at what? What's the contest? Or, perhaps more appropriately, asking whether your neighborhood can beat your table saw. Talk about comparing apples and oranges -- and at least those are both fruit. Facebook is a community and Google is a tool. But the question may not be as farfetched as it seems, because undoubtedly, as each grows and explores new monetization opportunities, more common ground will emerge between the two.

Today I'll continue my trip down the MyLifeBits wormhole. In a nutshell, MyLifeBits is a Microsoft project devoted to digitizing and indexing an individual's entire life -- online/phone chats, media consumed, pictures of people/objects encountered, etc. -- and, in turn, making everything searchable. Assuming the challenges to creating and scaling such a tool can be met, let's ponder the implications for marketers of a widely adopted MyLifeBits platform.

It's time to step down from the lectern and take a break from the futurism and pontificating. This column's about search, so this week attention shifts to "search" as a verb. Here's a quick review of personal picks for the most useful search engines for a range of specialized searches that can come up day to day, grouped by the overall goal these engines can help accomplish.

After a mediocre Q2 earnings call and attacks from both piracy victims and privacy defenders, Google is still the online king. Can anything bring it down? I think the answer is yes, for a lot of reasons. This week I'll list just three areas of risk that Google faces.

Earlier this week I received two different media requests for quotes that were focusing on the development of new search engines. The journalists working on these pieces wanted to understand everything -- from why new search engines were needed, to which ones seemed to have the best chance of succeeding. And, as many journalists like to push their angle, they each asked the following salacious question, "Will Engine XYZ be the GoogleKiller?"

Last week, I looked at the impact the inclusion of graphics on the search results page might have on user behavior. This week, we look at the impact that personalization might bring.

On Aug. 27 Bodog, a $7.3 billion-a-year online casino business, lost its primary domain Bodog.com as a result of a patent dispute. As the story goes, 1st Technology of Las Vegas was suing Bodog in a Washington state court for patent infringement, and Bodog apparently did not defend itself. The judge awarded $50 million in damages, and forced its U.S.-based domain registrar to turn over Bodog's famous domain to 1st Technology, making Bodog.com go black to its members, link traffic and search engines. Needless to say, a domain move for an online business of this size could be potentially ruinous, …

Calling all spiders! Facebook wants its profiles to be part of your Web. Facebook will soon open up its 39 million profile pages to give them more visibility in search engines. As Danny Sullivan points out at Search Engine Land, search engines already index Facebook profiles -- though only about 25,000 are indexed, according to Amit Agarwal; that's 0.064% of all profiles. To date, profile indexing has largely been on an opt-in basis, but Facebook is now switching to an opt-out model.

When it comes to advertisers' running ads on competitors' terms, Google takes a free-market approach. Google -- which describes its ad program as simply "a provider of space for advertisements" -- takes limited responsibility for the keywords that advertisers bid on, and offers little more than a "limited investigation of reasonable complaints" when companies advertise on other business' trademarked terms. Many advertisers are clearly unhappy with trademark laxity. But what does Google's relaxed trademark treatment mean for searchers? The answer, I think, is a better variety of search results.

A couple of months ago, I participated in a 3-part series aimed at defining a search engine. In my contribution, I made the claim that a Web service that doesn't search beyond its own e-borders is not a true search engine. Now I'd like to make an additional claim, namely, that search can be divided into two categories: the passers and the catchers.