The hottest tech website this year so far has been Facebook. What once was a website dedicated to American college students proudly displaying their drunken pics and videos has now gained so much mindshare that even Rupert Murdoch, owner of Facebook rival MySpace, has publicly stated he wishes his web property was more like it. People and businesses are flocking to join this latest online hotspot, yet the site isn't so hot with search engines that normally drive traffic on the web.

Unlike other social networking sites, Facebook does not allow search engines to come in and snoop around, so they can't catalogue all the media content being created and consumed inside its massive online community. For Google, which is proud of its ability to monitor the web for newly uploaded content and display it quickly in its search results, the inability to access a vibrant and energetic community creating millions of new pieces of data every day undermines its core proposition. Google's motto of "organising the world's information" might need to add "except the data of 50 million Facebook users".

The shine fades on all social networks and people will move on to the next bright young thing.

Being acutely aware of this, Facebook started giving developers access to the technology behind the site, allowing anyone to build applications which could plug directly into the Facebook platform.

In one bold move Facebook turned itself into the web's version of a Lego set, where anyone could build any kind of creation on top of it. This new open platform has only been around a short few months but already users have built thousands of new web applications for Facebook . . . attracting millions more people to the website and generating even more content.

The thing is, Google can't get to it, but the Facebook search engine can. Search companies see Facebook as a giant black hole on the web because these Facebook applications suck in the world wide web but no data ever escapes.

Facebook now offers all its own content on top of everything you can get elsewhere online, so there is no need to leave.

If Facebook can offer everything to its users, then those people will spend less time on the open web, which will naturally impact Google and its ad revenues.

Google, as well as being a search company, is the most successful online ad company ever and much of this is down to their relevance technology, which matches the most suitable ad to whatever webpage is being viewed.

If Facebook emulated Google's ad system but tied into the detailed profiles of millions of Facebook people, it would easily out-Google Google.

Ads on Facebook could be far more relevant than anything Google could offer, encouraging advertisers to flock to the site and pay a premium on ads, netting Facebook a fortune and hurting Google yet again.

With Google bloodied and battered from losing market share and ad revenue, Facebook could do one final thing to seal the search engine's fate: enable outside search.

Facebook could build their own Google clone and offer personalised internal and external search with targeted advertising.

People currently speculate that Google might buy Facebook, but maybe Facebook will end up buying Google.