Facebook rolled out a limited test tonight of a new search interface which for the first time lets people search their News Feeds and brings up results chronologically from their streams. The new search interface is still experimental and has only been turned on for “a fraction of a percent of the people” on the social network. I am one of the lucky few. My initial impression is that this is the first time I’ve actually been able to find anything on Facebook without having to jump through 25 hoops to get the results I want.
The ability to search my personal stream with results coming back in chronological order is key. This is how Facebook will do real-time search. For instance, if I want to see what my friends think about the new TweetDeck apps which just launched tonight, I can see all their comments on the subject, followed by comments from everyone with a public feed whether they are my friend or not. In the right-hand column are page and people results.
Facebook explains in a blog post:
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. You will also be able to search for status updates, posted links and notes in Search from people who have chosen to make their profile and content available to everyone.
This is a much better search experience than what most people must suffer through currently. When most people type in a keyword in the search box, Facebook will still default to searching their friends or all of Facebook. Search results favor people’s names or pages which contain the keyword (see screenshot below). If you want to search for an application, for instance, you have to click on application search specifically.
The new experimental search results are more unified. The central results are from your feed, and results from the rest of Facebook (people, pages, groups, applications) are presented on the side when relevant, or you can filter the results by type. Facebook cannot afford to cede real-time search to Twitter. Search becomes a form of navigation when information is thrown at you in a fleeting stream. The only way to recover the past or discover something you missed is through search.
Do you know by any chance if Microsoft was in involved in this, or if they can integrate this with bing somehow? Microsoft is the sole search provider for facebook
No, M$ is not the sole search provider for Facebook — where do you get this stuff from?
yes they are. Microsoft also owns 1.6% of facebook
http://www.allf...arch-agreement/
Facebook builds its own search products, they have a whole team of engineers working on it.
Searchable content is true public content. Otherwise the “public” content is not really public.
This is exciting news and this is a threat to Twitter too.
Arrington said in a previous post “If you were to distill Facebook down to its core magic, you’d have Twitter’s real time news stream with a really expensive-to-maintain photo site bolted on.”
That statement is so inaccurate and it is 1/10th of the offering possibilities of FB. You can read my post about it all here. Since I am not a POWER Blogger, I doubt if i will ever be quoted. At least not yet!
http://oonwoye....k-i-am-serious/
This is exciting news and this is a threat to Twitter too.
Arrington said in a previous post “If you were to distill Facebook down to its core magic, you’d have Twitter’s real time news stream with a really expensive-to-maintain photo site bolted on.”
That statement is so inaccurate and it is 1/10th of the offering possibilities of FB. You can read my post about it all here. Since I am not a POWER Blogger, I doubt if i will ever be quoted. At least not yet!
http://oonwoye....k-i-am-serious/
This is a huge improvement, and pretty damn cool.
“You will also be able to search for status updates, posted links and notes in Search from people who have chosen to make their profile and content available to everyone.”
It’s all about that sentence.
they want this: http://www.tech...-search-engine/
Time to update fb’s privacy page. Arrange settings well in tree structure. Which is currently a mess, rather intentionally and not necessarily it was made.
Arrington, since past posts are adequately linked in blog text there is no need to give “see also” section like competing blogs. But generally links to future blog posts wont be present in any blog post page, it is better to include those links in automatically generated section. The section can be named “related posts in future”.
Came to my mind as you posted a link to past post. Hope this helps!
Or “talk back” in responses section already works that way. Ignore my suggestion.
Wish I had the beta search. I mused about searching my feed when the new news feed rolled out a while ago…
“Posts by friends” section of beta search is actually your newsfeed.
Definitely looking a whole lot better
As the biggest social network, facebook staffs always improve their website to give users more easy to use it. One of the new tool is facebook search engine, although it is only in beta, I think with search engine facebook is better than without search engine.
this is really a gud improvement and if it works fine in beta it wll boost facebook uses
This is a great idea that facebook has rolled out their search.
However, it is still within the walled garden of facebook and is only available within its walls.
What good is search (public search) if it is not accessible to all?
Regards,
Armand
@ArmandAguillon
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want random people being able to search my stream – I only want my friends. You know, my logged-in friends who are inside the walled garden.
Ok, but doesn’t this freebie of early access to new super cool feature affect the journalist objectivity?
(Ducking and covering
#wantsex #zip90210 25/m Asian athletic
Twitter meet Frienster. Facebook will win real-time because their site actually has a mainstream appeal. Believe it or not, my mother, sister, brother, don’t want to sign up to rss feeds, nor do they want to join twitter, even when they know their fav celeb is on it. They are however on facebook and also participate in updating their status updates on there. Twitter needs to innovative fast (as Facebook has), or else it may never fully go mainstream, like Digg has failed to (and I like and use Digg).
Is there a way to get this beta feature? Looks really promising.
I guess Facebook is over then. Which site should we be using now? Or perhaps are we gonna all move to Opera Unite?
Nice title, nice content. Nowhere else screenshot. Good old TC, our TC!
This is going to be very interesting to see how it actually works. Nice blog post Mike.
This is pretty cool and huge improvement
This is positioned as Facebook catching up to Twitter, but this new search does one thing Twitter doesn’t, and that I really wish it did: the ability to search just the people I’m following.
With the new Facebook search as described here, I can see what my friends are saying about a given topic: Iran, or iPhone 3.0. On Twitter, I can only go swimming in the massive, global stream. It’s impossible to isolate what only my friends are saying on a broad topic.
The ability to limit search to one’s personal Twitter stream is too useful a feature to not be in Twitter’s crosshairs. But for now, I can see how Facebook’s supposed “also ran” move here is actually a minor advancement.
My account always gets deactivated, I havent had any problems getting it reactivated untill now. I cant seem to get it to send me a e-mail to reactivate. Wht do I need to do?