Facebook enhances its search

Monday 22 March 2010 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

Tags: Facebook, Search, Social Networking

Earlier last week, Facebook began rolling out improvements to its search experience. The social networking site seems increasingly focused on opening up data and this latest move may worry the guys at Mountain View a little further.

Facebook's search concept is that pulling suggestions from your extended network of like-minded people will get you to what you're searching for more quickly. On the Facebook blog on Tuesday, Wayne Kao, one of the company's engineers, explained the changes in his post:

"Discovering and making connections to friends, applications and other voices is an important part of your experience on Facebook. That's why today we are rolling out an improvement to Search to help you quickly find and connect with the people, Pages, groups, events and applications you care about. Now as you're typing in a query in the search bar, you will instantaneously see results not only of the people, events, groups and Pages you're connected with but also the connections of your friends and globally relevant results. You'll see a wider variety of relevant results and be able to discover new connections you might want to make on Facebook right as you're entering your search."

Previously, when using Facebook's search facility, the site would automatically suggest existing connections. For example, if you had a friend called Harry and you began to type his name into the search box, you would see a link to his profile. Now, however, the search facility will make much wider recommendations based on your network of friends and what is popular in the wider Facebook community. Preliminary results will appear as you type, organised by relevancy - with one variable being whether any of your friends is associated with an app or page, for example.

Wayne Kao explains the new feature further:

"For example, if you start typing in 'MGM' to find the Facebook Page for the band MGMT, you may see it as the first result in the drop-down menu because you or one of your friends is a fan of MGMT on Facebook. You can simply hit enter on that result and you will be taken directly to the MGMT Page. If you are searching for something else, like the MGM Grand Las Vegas hotel or the movie studio MGM, you can select one of those instead from the drop-down menu."

If the suggested results don't hit the spot, users can simply click on 'see more results' to take them to Facebook's full search results.

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