Today, Facebook is starting to roll out a new feature in their search bar that incorporates more results relevant to your network’s connections. Engineer Wayne Kao wrote on Facebook’s blog today that the site will be serving up more search results, and to do so, they’ll leverage your social graph. The aim is to surface more information while maintaining relevance.
When you use the search bar from your profile, you’ll still get a dropdown list showing your friends and any Facebook Pages that you are a member/ fan of. However, now you’ll also automatically see in that list Pages that friends are members/ fans of, as well as connections of friends and other “globally relevant results.”
For example, if you type a partial term and it matches a Group that one of your friends is in, that Group will appear in the search results dropdown list. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, claims Kao’s post, you can use the “See More Results for xxxx” link at the bottom of the dropdown list, to get a search page where you can refine your search.
Note that they are rolling out this feature over a few days, so you may not see the ability yet from your Facebook profile. I don’t see yet, so I haven’t tested it, but in theory, it’s a nice step towards the type of true social search engine that AllFacebook Editor Nick O’Neill has talked about previously.
From what I know of Facebook, they seem to have an agile approach to development, rolling out many new code changes on a very regular, possibly daily basis. I equate to this to a Kaizen approach of incremental improvements. This suggests to me that they’ll keep rolling out additional social search features as they’re ready, rather than in one big update. This is partially because there are significant complexities to fully implementing a social search engine. If you’re interested in hints of what’s probably coming — relevance indicators, social context, global popularity — have a look at Akhil Wabe’s post, Intro to Facebook Search, published today to Facebook’s Engineering notes.
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So pretty much if your Page has a shit ton of fans (or group) this will only help you.
The rich get richer with these social networks.
Comment by Brandon Mendelson — March 16, 2010 @ 5:30 pm
One things that I don’t like is the new privacy settings. What if I want to find a family member or a friend? I can’t find them if they block everything. That kinda sucks.
Another thing that would be cool is if you could see who has the most friends out of all of your current friends or anyone on facebook.
I’m pretty sure whoever signs up at http://www.FamousMembers.com will definitely have the most friends some time in the future. It will be interesting to see who signs up.
Comment by Brandon — March 16, 2010 @ 7:44 pm
I have also discovered that the "Customize" function for Fan Pages are gone? I can no longer choose to make an update in one language only or to a specific country?
Anyone know anything about this?
Comment by Razmus Svenningson — March 17, 2010 @ 3:20 am
Wow, I think for once I'm one of the first getting the change in a roll out. Anyway, I discovered this yesterday, and the only thing I don't like about it is, if you're searching quickly and aren't yet used to the function, once you put a full word in it will pull you fully into ONE search result automatically rather than the full dropdown list of options we used to have. You have to be kind of quick to scroll down and click on "See more results" before you even finish putting a whole word in, otherwise it pulls that one result in first. I hope they refine that.
Comment by Ally — March 17, 2010 @ 4:27 am
Razmus – Mine still has "everyone" or "customize" as options. I wonder if they're rolling out changes to that too. I wish there were more options though like region or county.
Comment by Karen — March 18, 2010 @ 6:20 pm