I saw an article in TechCrunch that says "Facebook expands search to all 2 trillion posts, surfacing public real-time news." Now, I haven't been able to try this yet, and it doesn't really seem to have been rolled out yet (as and when it is, it will most likely be available to people who have the language set as US English first, which is the way Facebook generally does stuff) but there are a huge number of implications for search.
News. Clearly this is going to be really important; anything that's published to 'public' is going to be searchable. Facebook is already taking on Google news and other news outlets with trending information, and this is going to be another body blow to those sources. It's going to be particularly important to take into account authority and validity, but Facebook seems to have that covered - I'll discuss more below. I will be interested to see just how many people change their posting style to make things generally available to everyone, not just their contacts. If you want to be taken seriously on Facebook its something that you might want to consider - certainly if you're an expert in a particular area. Does that mean that we'll have to come to grips more closely with the groups that we post to, or will people be inclined to create second accounts?
If all those trillions of posts are searchable, are people more likely to start a search on Facebook, than they are on traditional search? I suspect that it's going to be depend on the way that they use Facebook at the moment - if it's open as a tab, then it's going to become a tempting prospect.
Web V People. This is something that I talk about a lot - Google is great at sending you to pages, not so great at identifying people. This is the real strength that Facebook will have; identifying experts. Are you going to trust them more than a webpage? Are you going to spend time attempting to be seen as an expert yourself?
Corporate use of Facebook. I am often told that people can't access Facebook at work. With a serious change to search, that surely has to be addressed in the future. How much longer can a resource that's used daily by a billion people be ignored? What happens when the Facebook page is as important - or more important - than the website? How will corporations really address the fact that anyone can post stuff about them quickly and easily AND that it can be found by anyone else?
OMG, what did I post? This is going to raise its head even higher in the future, and there will be a whole rash of posts talking about ways in which you can increase your privacy, and check back through your timeline. It's going to be interesting to see what happens when on one side you have a huge increase in the availability of content, and on the other, people desperate to close it down.
What is Facebook search going to look like in the future? I'm guessing that at this stage, no-one is quite sure. Facebook has been playing around with search for a while now. They really expanded it out to Graph Search with all of the different filters, then they pulled back on that again. This new version would (according to the TC source I linked to) have suggestions for keywords you could search on, personalisation, giving you results that your friends or their friends have talked about in posts, the normal groups/pages content, trusted news sources, popular posts (maybe those that have been liked, commented and shared) and 'other' results that Facebook thinks you'll like.
As a result I think we're going to get even MORE spam, hoaxes and general rubbish on Facebook. As a profession we are going to have to get to grips with Facebook search as much, or even more than we do with traditional search, in order to assist our library members.
However, much of this is simply conjecture at the moment, but rest assured, it's something that I'll be keeping a close eye on and will be blogging about in the future!
In my opinion I think that Facebook is already a search engine because for example if you are looking for a nice restaurant you just need to open your Facebook account and write "restaurant + your town" and you will find a list of restaurant. More you will see “Likes” more the restaurant will attract you.
But I think that Facebook need to improve the search for cultural topics...
Like you said if Facebook develop the search engine side they will need to be careful about bad content.
Posted by: Marc Delaney | November 04, 2015 at 03:47 PM