The co-founder of the business that became Google Maps now leads a team of engineers at Facebook. Their mission is to improve search, and to achieve this by leveraging Facebook’s huge reserves of data from its 800 million active users. Danish-born Lars Rasmussen has to keep the content confidential, but he says it isn’t a ‘go-after-Google’ product. “I can’t predict what will happen in the future but I don’t think it will make sense for us at this stage to even begin to think about doing web search. Google does that so well.” Rasmussen joined Facebook after co-founder Mark Zuckerberg invited him to “come hang out with us for a while and we’ll see what happens.”
He sees the industry trends going in decades, citing IBM, then PC and Microsoft, the Google and the Web. Rasmussen says “The current decade, I think it’s a little bit unusual as there are two important trends: one is social and one is mobile. And there are two big companies setting the trends and its obviously Facebook in social and Apple in mobile.”
