Facebook Search – The Final Part In The Jigsaw
I’ve been writing a lot about Facebook in recent times and so has the entire world it would seem and with good reason because Facebook is on it’s way to becoming a platform that could define everything about your online presence. For all their great innovation and amazing statistics though there has always been one particular feature on Facebook that just doesn’t work…Search. It’s actually stunning that a company that executes as well as Facebook would leave the primary feature that they place front and center on every single page in such a poor state. There has been plenty of talk about Facebook taking on Google but that thought is not even remotely possible without a vast improvement in Facebook search and you really have to think search is the last piece missing in the Facebook Jigsaw….
Search Is Useless
Not everybody goes to Facebook to search for stuff but as part of my job I do. Try looking for a local business or brand page and you will basically drive yourself mad. More often than not Facebook will give you about 10 similar answers and I often find myself heading out to Google to use their search to try and find things within Facebook. If there is a brand, event, place or business you want to like on Facebook the chances are that it will take you a long time to find it.
No Point Searching A Walled Garden
The crucial thing to remember here is that until recently Facebook was a walled garden and very much a private network. It was somewhere to share photos privately with your friends and family. That is one of the main reasons why search was so hard and largely useless on Facebook because there just wasn’t much public data to be searched or people searching for it. Facebook reacted to the emergence of real time services like Twitter and have switched course with the introduction of public business pages, the like button, Facebook connect and encouraging users to share more info through the stream. So while 18 months ago there was no real need to search Facebook we are now in a position where we need to be able to search Facebook in a more detailed way.
Facebook Have The Data
All those likes you are clicking around the web. All those times you share content back in to your stream. All the business pages you like and your friends like. The checkins that people are starting to do in the real world. All the status updates. This is all content that is focused around your own and your friends social graphs and it really needs to be searchable. It does bring huge privacy issues and that could explain some of the delay and the reluctance on Facebook’s behalf to rush anything out but there is no doubt that Facebook have the data to do this right.
Why Leave It Broken So Long?
So why would Facebook leave such a crucial feature of the site broken for so long? My own take on this is that they didn’t have enough data and they knew that their roadmap would take them towards a far more open platform with lots more data. I’d be pretty stunned if they didn’t have a large team working on this internally as we speak. Their partnership with Bing has been interesting to date and although there have certainly been some early innovative moves you really have to feel the best is still to come. There has been a lot of talk about social search for the last year but to be honest I haven’t seen anything I like yet. What I want is to see places, businesses, products and events that people in my network like and have them surfaced on a very local level and I don’t think we are too far away from that and I’d expect Facebook to upgrade their search pretty soon to provide the last piece in the jigsaw.
