Facebook Updates Search Feature to include public posts
Last week, Facebook announced that it will be indexing all two trillion posts. The way this will work is through making these public posts widely available on the entire network, and a search on any term or a set of terms will return all related public posts that users are allowed to see. The new function will also accommodate the pop up of posts way back from the past, in 2004, when it all started.
The way they will set apart their search feature will be through displaying recent stories and news updates as they are unfolding in the real world. This poses a threat to Twitter’s functionality of scanning news. Additionally, straying away from the traditional search engines such as Google, Facebook will facilitate more personalized searches and will give an ‘aggregate overview of sentiment.’
This is really interesting and it relates to some of the concepts we have been talking about it in class; in particular, it is interesting to think about how Facebook will authorize its results. Google’s Page Rank system will be less applicable to Facebook’s search engine algorithm. Facebook will use likes, comments, and number of shares of the post to authorize the source. Additionally, as mentioned above, Facebook will place a higher emphasis on posts that are trending and more recent and thus will receive a higher value.
Although this is a long-term initiative, it will be interesting to see how searching for information could change drastically, and become more personalized over time.
Sources:
http://www.toptechnews.com/article/index.php?story_id=113003J9JLVB
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/23/facebook-launches-search-feature-taking-swing-google-twitter.html
http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/22/9587122/new-facebook-search-all-public-posts