Did Zuckerberg Photo Reveal Facebook’s Answer To Google?

Last week, the day after the IPO, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbeg shared a photo of his desk with a sign encouraging focus. At the time, I thought it was a great PR move, but when looking at it in more detail today, I noticed that his version of Facebook featured a large search bar at the top of his laptop (You can download a high res version from his own profile here).

As you can see, the design is completely different to the Facebook we all use. Search is one area that Facebook have always been weak on, but with Microsoft an investor and a deep partnership with Bing, it has long been expected that Facebook could start rolling out an improved social search of its own. They certainly have enough data.

So what is this large search box that dominates the top of Zuckerberg’s profile? Is it actually some sort of competitor to Google search? Is it just something that they have hacked together and are testing? It could just be an internal view of Facebook that he uses with the logo pushed to one side, but my own hunch is that with Google pushing so hard into the social search space, Facebook could be preparing its own overhaul of their search functionality. It really would be about time.

As you can see below, a standard Facebook profile looks nothing like the one that Zuckerberg has on his screen. The search box is small and only sits at the center of the profile, and isn’t a main focus probably because of the poor quality results it currently returns. Let’s hope this is a new version of Facebook search because we have all been waiting for it long enough at this stage.