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.

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.

Why Create a New Facebook Search Engine?

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?

You shouldn’t expect Facebook and its improved search engine to take the

place of traditional information retrieval web search engines.

What is the New Facebook Search Engine?

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.

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.

What the New Facebook Search Engine is Not

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.