Facebook to Enter Search Market
Facebook announced Friday that they would be expanding their search services, allowing users to search much more than friends and posts. Specifically, Facebook is providing users with the capability to search topics and posts across Facebook — and the internet. This move comes as an action directly competing against Google, the industry standard in search. Under the current premises, Facebook’s selling point comes on their indexed results from their social media network and the ability to search quickly across the 2 trillion searches in their databases. Combined with the more than 1.5 billion searches conducted each day on the site, Facebook is well equipped with the data to improve their search and prediction algorithms.
It is interesting to consider the mechanism for which Facebook determines the best search results in terms of hubs and authorities. From the many resources Facebook can use to gauge the best result, it chooses to incorporate page links, likes, and users. Specifically speaking, hubs and authorities are defined in terms of pages linking to other pages and the relative weights of each page. When applied to the concept of likes, any page with a high number of likes in itself has already shown a high authority score as there have been many “approvals” through likes. But going one level deeper, it should be considered that likes come from users, and if a user who has liked a page that is high in results has also liked pages in other high results, then there may be some correlation between the user and the search results. Facebook utilizes a combination of these concepts to find it’s best results, considering likes, the weights of the (top) users, and the traditional page links.
Source: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/23/facebook-launches-search-feature-taking-swing-google-twitter.html