'I screwed up': Former Google CEO on Facebook threat

San Francisco: If he had another chance, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt would have pressed the Internet search leader to focus more on mounting a challenge to Facebook while he was still running the company. "I screwed up," Schmidt said late yesterday during a75-minute question-and-answer session at the D: All Things conference in Rancho Palos Verde, California.

[caption id="attachment_18624" align="alignleft" width="380" caption="Facebook's growing popularity is becoming more nettlesome for Google.Getty Images"][/caption]

Schmidt's admission comes nearly two months after he ended his decade-long stint as Google's CEO and became the company's executive chairman. He was replaced by Google co-founder Larry Page, who is pushing the company's employees to develop more ways to connect people with their friends and family like Facebook already does. That was a priority that Schmidt said he started addressing in internal memos written about four years ago when Facebook had about 20 million active users. But he acknowledged he and other executives didn't take Facebook seriously enough.

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Now, Facebook has more than 500 million users who share billions of links, posts and photos each month. Facebook's growing popularity is becoming more nettlesome for Google. As Facebook's audience grows, it is attracting more online advertising and stunting Google's financial growth. Perhaps even more troubling to Google, much of the information on Facebook's website can't be indexed by Google's search engine. That restriction threatens to make Google's less useful as more people form social circles online and could make it more difficult to get a handle on personal preferences, so it can do a better job selling ads.

AP