Facebook Strengthens Search Feature To Include Public Posts
image: Facebook.com
Facebook will start to include relevant results from all public posts in its search results. Facebook confirmed this major enhancement to its search function in an announcement last week. Facebook users can now expect to get better search results but not without some concern over privacy.
When Facebook users search using the improved feature, relevant results will be picked up from all public posts in addition to posts by friends. The search feature will also offer personalized suggestions with real time results for the topic highlighted as the user types in.
According to Tom Stocky, VP of Search, Facebook gets an impressive 1.5 billion searches daily and over 2 trillion posts. He sees Facebook as a medium that people turn to soon after a major event in the world, to see how their friends and family react. The large number of social interactions provides a valuable search index that can be used to provide better results.
The move is a hint that the social media giant is looking to compete with Google and Twitter. Twitter has also done some improvements in the recent past and is able to gather breaking news more efficiently, coming in direct competition with Facebook. Both Facebook and Twitter are keen to exploit their massive user posts data, mining for real-time results that are fresh and relevant.
Facebook has also indicated that it next plans to cover photos and people in the search results.
The availability of almost a decade worth of old public posts searchable by any is probably bad news to some who may have embarrassing old posts mistakenly created as ‘public’ floating around. For such users who are not comfortable in seeing their public posts from the past appearing in search results of users outside their friends-network, a simple tweak in the privacy settings will restore normalcy. Simply changing selected posts from ‘Public’ to ‘Friends; or ‘Only Me” is all that is required.
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