AllFacebook has discovered that Facebook is now testing showing all liked news articles in its search results. This would obviously be a significant move as the company competes with Google. Nick O’Neill writes:
Additionally, the results for searches now shows the results from all around the web based on two things: the number of likes and the number of friends who liked that object, most likely leveraging some of the technology shown in their recently approved patent. We first received reports of these search results showing up earlier yesterday.
The search results have now become dramatically more relevant with the inclusion of recent news articles, something that previously wasn’t accessible via Facebook’s open graph search results. Currently, the search results only appear within the drop down from Facebook’s search box, however I’d assume that this will eventually shift to Facebook’s search area, which has yet to undergo a significant overhaul.
Facebook has a lot going on as usual. It was also discovered that the company is testing a subscription feature. This could end up being another key element. The feature would provide alerts to users when someone they are subscribed to makes an update. This could make Facebook infinitely more valuable as a news tool.
If Facebook can improve its search on top of that, it’s going to do something for its search market share. Nobody’s saying it’s going to overtake Google in search, but we could start to see it take away some of the searches that would otherwise have gone to Google (or another search engine), simply based on how much time people are already spending on Facebook.
It’s something to keep an eye on, at the very least. What do you think? Comment here.
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