New York — Many leading search engines are increasingly focusing on social enhancements — Recently, Microsoft’s Bing and Google have crowned their search engines with social media of their choice, but now, the leading social networking giant Facebook appears to have upgraded its own search: the site now groups query results under category headings.
Facebook has already uprooted Google as the site users spend the most time on, and as complaints about SEO-ed junk content clogging up Google’s search results grow louder, many searchers nowadays are turning to the number one social media network.
Previously, search results would show up in the drop-down menu without any organization, but now, with the growing hostility between the duo, Facebook has silently made searching far more intuitive by categorizing results by labels such as “apps,” “shared posts,” “pages” and “people”.
When people have been asked as to, “How do you search on Facebook? Don’t you just use Facebook search to reach a friend and maybe a fan page?” Nope! said a user — you can use Facebook search to find out what your friends are sharing, especially regarding current issues.
Facebook organizes them by category headings, as you can see in the screenshot above. For instance, a query with “facebook,” and the results were categorized according to “Pages,” “Shared Links” and “Apps” — that social users had shared on Facebook.
Now, with “Shared Links” they are organized better, and often appear above other results. The new organization of results speaks to the growing types of content available on Facebook, and it indicates that users are looking to discover more Pages, information, brands, etc., on the site. The message for marketers is that social content matters.
Furthermore, when you click on “see more results from search,” the following page displays pages and applications in one long area, but if you scroll down, the heading “posts by everyone” appears.
Facebook certainly has the strongest assemblage of personal interactions on the entire web. This is one reason why the social media giant Facebook is a potentially dangerous opponent of Google’s.
Facebook has also been encouraging the addition of different types of information to be added to its internal network with things like Facebook Questions and Wikipedia-like community pages. So with this themes in mind, marketers will want to optimize the content they share on Facebook to catch relevant clicks and Likes. Boosting Facebook content search-ability may also enhance search rankings.
Nevertheless, you never know what future acquisitions Facebook might make, which could play their own roles. But sooner or later, Facebook Places (combined with Bing Mpas) could evolve to power some powerful local results too.
Pretty cool — and likely to give Google some serious chill.