This afternoon I got to thinking about various opportunities for businesses to leverage Facebook and realized that Facebook is not taking advantage of one of their greatest opportunities: search. A few months ago, Microsoft announced that they were going to begin offering Microsoft Live search results for Facebook as well as search ads. So far nothing has been implemented.

The most important search results on Facebook is people but many users are regularly search for specific products and services within Facebook yet those products and services are not the first results that are displayed. Most often you need to click on the “Pages” tab to find any of the brands or services. In the case that it’s a person, a fan page will regularly show up but this only appears to occur for people.

So how could Facebook help businesses leverage what’s currently an unrealized opportunity? Simple: sponsored results. If I search for “Ford” and was looking for Ford Motors and not my friend who’s last name was “Ford”, a sponsored ad will show up at the top of the search which directs me to the “Ford Motor Company” fan page. I’ve produced a sample image below of what this could look like.

Currently Facebook has the curse of extremely engaging pages. The site is so engaging that most people don’t even realize that there are ads on the side of most pages. The one place where I’d suggest that this trend breaks is when people search for things. At this point there is an amazing opportunity to grab the user’s attention.

How many people are searching for Ford on a regular basis? I don’t know but enough people are writing about it that it shows up in the Facebook Lexicon, which tracks the frequency of words on walls. If people are writing about it, then it’s probably pretty good assumption that they are writing about it. While Facebook doesn’t currently monetize their search, this is a quick way for the company to boost their revenues while they keep searching for a breakthrough advertising solution.