Facebook Inc., (NASDAQ: FB)- The social networking giant expands its search engine capabilities, by making it access all two trillion posts that have been published to the website.
First there were plans for a dedicated spot for videos, then we met Notify, FB’s latest real-time news app. Now Facebook completes its concept by expanding search to all of its 2 trillion posts that have been uploaded to the page by all kinds of users; people, pages, businesses, media etc.
MUST READ: Meet Notify, Facebook’s real time news app
The results should be enough to cover any aspect of news, given that new searches and results will constantly be added. Moreover, there will be categorized highlight posts from trusted news sources, followed by people in your network, lists of the most popular links or quotes about a topic, and then strangers.
Of course, Twitter has a similar search feature, but since Facebook is the largest social network in the world, it’s much easier to make it more human-centered and as Google has proven search queries indicate intent, which can be used to sell highly lucrative keyword advertising in sponsored search results. So combining those, Facebook can expect a substantial profit among other perks of its new service.
Tom Stocky, Facebook’s VP of Search told TechCrunch: “Because the business model for search is so well understood, we know it will come when it makes sense.”
Throughout the years, Facebook’s search has been used for searching friends, pages, apps and search ads and last year the company’s team experimented and made available the search for specific posts using keywords, but only for posts that have appeared on the user’s News Feed.
Today’s update gives Facebook a holistic internal search engine as it’s a discovery engine for real-time news that’s just slipped out of the future into the present.
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And who’s to say that before you know it, Facebook could end up offering its service as a completed new search engine, whose results are solely based on posts coming from users and legitimate sources of any nature.
On the downside of this move, users’ posts can get much easier exposed. This might not be considered as a drawback on its own, but just the idea of having anyone seeing a silly post that you uploaded years ago, or reading an off-color joke, could give you the creeps.
In order to help users get more familiar with the new update, the search typeahead will now suggest popular keyword strings that complete what you were searching for, while matching people or things will appear below them. The results will then be broken up into several sections.
Have you tried out Facebook’s new search mechanism? Let us know in the comments below.
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Facebook Newsroom
Featured image credit: TechnoBuffalo
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