Is Social Media Changing Search Marketing?

Google is still king of search marketing with two-thirds of the pie, per comScore. And that figure hasn’t changed much from October 2009 to October 2010. This is no news; search marketing operates almost exclusively via Google these days, despite occasional spurts of growth from Bing and the impending Bing-Yahoo merger.
But there is one site that’s competing with Google: Facebook. “Facebook was the most popular Web site in the U.S for the week ending March 13 [2010],” reported Promo in May, when Facebook found itself on the top of Internet traffic for the first time. “With … 7.07% of all site visits, the social net barely edged out longtime Web leader Google, which had a 7.03% share of the traffic during that same week.”
And just last week it was announced that Facebook had “almost one-fourth of page views and 10% of Internet visits” — that’s the whole Internet, folks.
More than just traffic, people just seem more drawn to Facebook today than any other site. “Today, no matter what side of the privacy issue you favor, Facebook’s LIKE buttons are usurping Google’s prominence in this space and are gaining more trust than search results,” blogs Ron Callari.
Insult to injury: Google’s recently lost a lot of its key employment positions to Facebook. Even though Google strongholds like display advertising are still seeing respectable growth, in terms of where people spend all there time online, Google is simply being outstripped.
But is that just for now? And if it is long-term, what kinds of effects witll this have on affiliate marketing?