Facebook’s New Search Algorithm
Recently, Facebook has pushed to make its site more of a news outlet instead of primarily a social media network. They have done this through changing how the search bar works – instead of having searches result in people that you may know, instead it will show other people’s posts related to the topic. By changing the way that search terms interact with its people, Facebook hopes to be able to use its site to keep people informed so they will not have to use other sites to find out what’s trending. By taking the text and photos that its users post day to day, they condense that information into what the user would probably like to see. Now, similar to the way twitter operates, users will primarily find news on their feeds and in their searches.
Facebook also manages to tailor to its individual users, knowing their preferred search history and the interests of them and their friends, using those page ranks to find out what you want to see. By adding and indexing the posts that other people make, searching will now result in what you want to see, from between over 2 trillion posts from users around the world.
The new algorithm balances relevance with interest, including a lot more posts in their PageRank algorithm to both broaden its user’s results and pinpoint exact topics the people may be interested in. Since Facebook may have one of the largest databases on the internet, this surely will be helpful to allow Facebook’s users to find the information they want quickly and effectively. When PageRank is suited to each individual person’s needs, that user will prefer to use that search engine to their news and reduce ones reliance on other websites – effectively what Facebook wants to accomplish with their changes.
Source: http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/22/9587122/new-facebook-search-all-public-posts