Facebook is going into Search

At the TechCrunch Disrupt 12 event in San Francisco Mark Zuckerberg candidly announced that Facebook would be going into “search” at some point in the future. Among other announcements he stated that Facebook gets approximately 1 billion searches every day “without even trying”, adding that the majority of searches are for people with profiles on the network, with a large bulk searching for applications and brands.

Quite how Facebook intends to capitalise on this search volume and what exactly can be done to introduce a “social search” remains unclear. Facebook is however uniquely positioned to take advantage of personalised search results and has the added dimension of recommendations that can determine what your friends think about a specific event, venue or product – did they like it and therefore will you?

It is the human factor that Facebook aim to add to the search results, making them “social” and ultimately more valuable than results delivered by a cold algorithm.

Chuckling somewhat, Zuckerberg added: “At some point, we’ll do it“.