Facebook is still a ways off from Google’s 3.5 billion daily searches, but it’s an impressive figure nonetheless and puts Facebook right up there as far as search giants go.
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The change is part of a push on the part of Facebook to compete with main rival Twitter on live events, something where the latter’s broad search and chronological focus has given it the edge. The search feature will also offer personalized suggestions with real time results for the topic highlighted as the user types in. He sees Facebook as a medium that people turn to soon after a major event in the world, to see how their friends and family react.
Facebook has also indicated that it next plans to cover photos and people in the search results. Stocky says: “Your search results are personalised and unique to you and, as always, you can only see things that have been shared with you”. Facebook added this functionality to its mobile search results, as well.
Facebook’s vice president of search Tom Stocky announced the update in blog post; “When you search, you’ll now see the most recent, relevant public posts along with posts from your friends”, he said.
Facebook users are being encouraged to double-check their privacy settings after the social network introduced an update to its search feature which adds nearly 2 trillion older posts by its members to the index. It used to be hard to find older Facebook posts unless you were friends with the person.
“Facebook has a much wider audience than Twitter”, said Ms McGarry. “People who don’t want any future posts to appear on search can make them private”. A search on a particular term or set of terms will return any post a user is allowed to see.
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However, the search will only index public posts and others that have been shared directly with a user. And search functionality is “an important, long-term effort at Facebook”, he said, adding that search results will now be better organized to show what people are currently posting about trending topics. But Facebook’s Search function will place a premium on recent posts so that users can follow stories as they’re unfolding. Give it a shot and let us know what you think!
