What is the new Facebook search engine?
Many media outlets are reporting that Facebook will be introducing new Facebook search engine on their site in the future. This may be in response to Google Plus One and its search engine capabilities. The purpose of the new Facebook search engine, from current reports, is to better use the content that users place on the site. This content can be anything from brand pages to status updates. There will even be a way to use the “Like” button which Facebook is so famous for to market things from other sites. Having this feature will allow Facebook users to have many of the features of Google Plus One, a competing social media website, and more.
Why Create a New Facebook Search Engine?
According to reports, anywhere from 20 to 24 engineers are working on this new Facebook search engine under the direction of an engineer, Lars Rasmussen, who used to work for Google. With so much information accessed on this network on a daily basis, this feature will make Facebook more user-friendly. An estimated 336 millions searches were conducted in February alone on this popular site so you can see why it would be a welcome addition although this does not come close to the major sites such as Google, Yahoo, Ask, Bing and AOL. It also doesn’t come close to sites such as Amazon and Craigslist although there are 800 million Facebook users at this time.
The current Facebook search engine allows users to search for people, places, apps, groups, pages and events. It also allows searches for music, posts by friends, group posts, public posts and web results. Bing currently provides these search results, but the company wants to take this a step further. What exactly is it that the improved Facebook search engine will do?
What is the New Facebook Search Engine?
You shouldn’t expect Facebook and its improved search engine to take the place of traditional information retrieval web search engines. At this time, it appears the focus of the Facebook search engine will be to make it easier to find things within the social media website itself. This may be anything from locations, subscriptions, images, relationships and likes.
What many expect to see when this feature is introduced is a search box that will allow you to enter a query and have it return results based on the data you have input for your area, your friends and pages you like. Although Facebook has yet to comment on what they are doing in respect to this, experts are making predictions.
What the New Facebook Search Engine is Not
The one thing that most people don’t expect to see when this search engine is introduced is a search engine similar to that seen with AOL, Google, Yahoo and the like. Not only does Facebook not have the manpower to take this task on, this is not the direction they are expected to take when it comes to social marketing. Rather they will allow you to search for something specific, say ballet clothing, and then choose criteria to be used in the search. For example, you could input a location or a group of friends. When you do so, the search feature would return places where they have checked in to purchase this clothing or online stores they have liked. This is another form of search engine optimization that users will likely love.
The expectation is that, at some point in the future, Facebook may choose to monetize this feature though the use of pay-per-click ads. Social ads have been very successful in the past, both in terms of click-through rates and ad recall. In addition, they may move toward something along the lines of Wikidata. This is a project Wikipedia has undertaken to ensure that content is edited across all of its sites when it is updated on one. This may be what Facebook is ultimately striving for. We can’t know for sure where this search engine will go as it is still in development. One thing we do know for sure is that Facebook is keeping quiet about their plans. There is sure to be much speculation until the new Facebook search engine feature is introduced though.
What do you think of the new Facebook search engine? Leave your comments and opinions below.