8 Comments »This evening Facebook has announced that they’ve begun testing out a new version of Facebook search. The latest version of search is a huge upgrade from the previous version. Now, rather than just seeing pages and people for a given search query, Facebook will search through content that’s posted by people, organizations, and public figures. According to Kari Lee, “With the test, you will be able to search your News Feed for the most recent status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan.”
This upgrade is nothing short of momentous. What’s interesting is that Facebook is emphasizing “up-to-the-minute results” from friends and Facebook Pages. The search demoed in the Facebook blog post is about the news in Iran. So why would Facebook make such a massive announcement at 10:26 pm? The only rationale I can come up with is that they are trying to squash some of the love from the press about Twitter as it has become the center of conversation in regards to the Iranian uprising.
This new iteration of search is interesting in that it shows all of the results among your friends and then those posts from other people around the site, something that not even Twitter search currently provides. What’s also interesting is the combination of the various types of media being posted. For the past few months I have been discussing how important Facebook’s search engine is and until today there had been no updates on the service.
In January I described the “real social search engine” but there was little buzz about any imminent Facebook releases. Tonight Facebook has announced this latest version of search and I have to say that it appears to be extremely impressive. I’m only frustrated that I’m not able to view the latest version of search yet! If you’re able to view the latest version of search, please let us know as we would love to see a hands on version!
Pretty sneaky of them to announce their twitter version of search at a time to crush twitter’s media influence. FB really seems intent on squishing them.
I don’t think FB is going to steal much, if any, attention from Twitter in the mainstream media with this announcement. Why don’t they simply publicize that FB is part of the Iranian situation along with Twitter?
Interesting, one feature coming back to Facebook at a time. I do remember ‘advanced search’ which pretty much did this and more from two years ago.
I wonder at which point re-activating something that had been disabled has become a ‘huge upgrade’ …
I am glad Facebook is finally heading in the direction of indexing user posted content and allowing users to search it.
Facebook is very efficient on notifying and displaying the content that has just been shared, but once the time passes by it is very difficult to find specific content that has been posted a while ago.
That’s why I wrote a utility that allows users to find their photo albums, events, links and notes by keywords.
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2369288014
Hope Facebook will make this part of their own feature set. One thing that the API does not currently offer is the ability to retrieve users’ videos. I have over 300 videos on Facebook and it’s a real pain to find a specific video!
I am trying to upgrade to the new version of facebook but I can’t find any place to do it from.
I have encountered an unusual problem with the silly Farm game on Facebook.I was on my way to having great success with it.But when I went to my farm today all I saw was a green area. No Farm! Has anyone else encountered this disconcerting problem?
have problems getting into my profile and home page.
Jungle jewels is my all time fav game now i get the play now button then a white page and i checked all the other games and there ok.