Facebook May Create a Search Engine

Are you waiting for a Facebook search engine? Well you’ll be happy to know that in the future at some point Facebook may do this, however it may not be as you expect it to be. In an interview, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, said that Facebook is currently carrying out a billion searches per day, “and we’re not even trying.”

As said in the past, most of the searches carried out are just people searching for other people, however they are also searching for brands, such as Nike, Pepsi etc. Mark said that there is a “big opportunity” there for creating a Facebook search engine that goes beyond people. However this “opportunity” might not be to build a search engine as big or similar to how search engines are traditionally portrayed. Zuckerberg talked of how the search engines take keywords into consideration, run “some magic” and then produce lists which are constantly changing.

Zuckerberg also stated that “Search engines are evolving to giving you a set of answers,” and in this new model, ”Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer a lot of questions that the people out there have.”

The man behind Facebook gave examples of wanting to know about the local sushi restaurants and being able to tell what the right answer would be based on your connections. “These are queries you could potentially do on Facebook if we built it out,” Zuckerberg said. “At some point we’ll do it,” and carried on to say “we have a team working on search.”

However Zuckerberg seemed to pull back on this by shortly after describing search as an “ongoing effort” which would be more focused around still helping people to find other people on Facebook and then said there was “nothing specific to announce.”

Facebook has indeed had a search team for quite a long time now, and it’s a team has seemingly done anything that competes with Google head-on, even when Google, as Arrington, who was interviewing Zuckerberg, joked by opening up the question about search. Might have “annoyed” Facebook by launching Google+ which is now fighting directly on the social front.

Personally I have always come away with the feeling that Facebook certainly had plenty to do especially getting the tough job of “discovery” of content through social right without going into the search space at all, which by no means is a small project. To help out with all of this, Facebook has lent its weight to Bing, making the search engine a close partner so that it could tap into its social data while Google has been completely locked out.

Being locked out certainly hasn’t hurt Google’s search relevancy in anyway, nor however has it somehow boosted Bing past Google on the back of Facebook’s data. When it comes to it, both of the search engines have seemed to struggle figuring out just how they can make use of the social signals.