Palo Alto, California — In today’s fast paced world of real-time status updates, search is spreading to account for the social nature of the web. And in tune with that — another major enhancement from social networking site Facebook is announced: the company is currently testing on-site search functionality that now displays search results–for Facebook and web content–based on “Likes” and shares.
Facebook seems to have silently rolled out the beefed-up search offering some time over the past few days; it was first spotted by All Facebook. Henceforth, when a user will input their query into the Facebook search articles related that someone has liked in the network will be included.
Just recently, Facebook was bestowed with a search patent for “ranking search results based on the frequency of clicks on the search results by members of a social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation.”
From the looks of it, Facebook is ranking results based on how users participate with content via its social plugins. It is still vague how Facebook is defining its formula–the formula seems to account for shares and Likes from a member’s friends as well as shares and Likes from everyone else to determine an item’s placement.
Apparently, the feature is meant to basically separate stories in categories based on how many times someone liked the result. The search results have now become impressively more relevant with the inclusion of recent news articles, something that previously was not accessible via Facebook’s open graph search results.
However, the results for searches now displays the results from all across the web based on two things: the number of likes and the number of friends who liked that article, most likely reaping the benefits some of the technology shown in their recently approved patent. But if you check yourself you will see that in some cases the results are not ranked by “Like”. Sometimes the item with much lesser number of likes takes priority over a story with a lot more likes.
Facebook has responded to an inquiry explaining: “We launched the ability to see articles shared by your direct friends in the search typeahead. For instance, if your friend is on a news site and clicks “Like” under one of the articles (which will then go into News Feed), when you go to search for that article on Facebook, it will surface in the dropdown.”
Nevertheless, this Facebook feature is an attempt to better serve the needs of Facebook users with the assumption that user’s friends can give better results instead of going to the entire web like Google search.
But that does not mean that it is better than Google search, although, for now, consider this as yet another small step in Facebook’s designs to seize search share from Google and harness the richness of data available around their social plugins.