While Facebook is in the midst of its biggest stock drop ever and is trading at an 18-month low, Google remains near a record and has easily outperformed all of its Big Tech peers over the past year.The difference is Apple.Google and Facebook are the two dominant online ad companies in the U.S. and have been for years. While the companies do very different things and have faced their own unique issues, their five-year stock charts look pretty similar.That’s when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s longtime struggle to control his own destiny started hitting his company’s financials.Facebook’s apps rely almost entirely on Apple and Google for distribution. So when Apple changed its privacy policy last year, limiting the ability of app developers to target users, Facebook was suddenly stripped of one of its most important assets.Google also relies on ad targeting to connect marketers with users on many of its properties, but search advertising is a unique asset — users tend to “self target” as they’re typing in a search query that explains exactly what they’re interested in at that moment..investing.com