San Francisco — Facebook Inc., the most popular social networking site just yesterday announced it had acquired a startup FriendFeed, and hot on the heels rolled out an update to real-time search late Monday that promises to give users more comprehensive results for status updates, links, photos, videos, and notes for friends and non-friends alike, another move aimed at strengthening its lead over rivals like MySpace Inc. and Twitter Inc.
Facebook had been beta testing the vastly improved search engine that returns real-time search results and the status updates of members who have chosen to make their information public, with a select group of users for the past month or so, and decided to roll out the feature, “based on the success of those tests,” putting the site into more direct competition with its rivals.
Akhil Wable, an engineering manager at Facebook, wrote in a blog post late yesterday that the new search program is being released to the network after a month of testing by a small group of users.
“You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you are a fan,” said Wable. “If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends.”
Search results will continue to contain people’s profiles, as well as relevant Facebook Pages, groups and applications. However, user can opt out of sharing their content via the search by altering their privacy settings.
This, for the first time, would allow users to find what other users with public profiles are saying about particular topics or news events. Further alteration as to how to search and share content are made possible by the acquisition of FriendFeed.
This is how the new search function looks like.
By presenting itself as a real-time search engine where anyone can search what Facebook users are saying, the social networking site could snap up market share and potential advertising dollars from Twitter.
A powerful blog Mashable commented: “Some might think FriendFeed was a second choice acquisition for Facebook, since the company could not acquire Twitter last year. But FriendFeed was probably the smarter choice.”
Leah Pearlman, Facebook’s product development manager, insists the changes are not a knee-jerk response to Twitter’s success.
Real-time search “is something Twitter obviously does but its a really important feature for any site,” she said in a statement.
“Its something we have been working on for — I do not want to say how long — for a really long time,” she added.
So far, however, Facebook’s search function had been exposed as inadequate. Results did not include status updates, and finding even basic features like applications or the company pages was tedious. Last week, Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, told the Financial Times: “Our search is not always wonderful yet. We know we need to improve it.”
Wable wrote in his blog post that to search for a particular term, like dinner, users just enter the query in the search box in the upper-right corner of any page. Once they get search results, they can use the filters on the left-hand side of the page to view only posts by friends or posts by everyone.
“By being able to search multiple types of content that are being shared on the site, you can easily find out your friends’ evening plans and recently frequented restaurants by searching for “dinner,” wrote Wable. “Discover which of your friends are following Michael Schumacher’s comeback during the “Formula 1” season by searching for the race series, or query “economy” to see if people or your favorite news sources feel that the recession is turning around.”
Last year, Facebook made unsuccessful attempt to acquire Twitter for $500m, but had its offer rebuffed.
Since then, it has made incremental changes that have emulated the service. “They would love to have bought Twitter, but that did not happen,” said Ray Valdes, an analyst with Gartner. “So they have been adding features to counter it.”
The upgrade also aids Facebook’s ambition of making the site more public. Facebook users have often vocally rejected changes to the site, with more than a million joining groups protesting at the last overhaul.
“With any change we definitely expect diversity of opinion. We have been working for a long time to make the change as smooth as possible,” Pearlman added.
“We always get a bit of a negative response to any kind of change.”
The announcement came hours after Facebook announced it would acquire FriendFeed , a social aggregation service with features similar to Twitter, for a reported $50m in cash and stock.