Earlier this week, Facebook announced the roll out of it’s new Search Feature, after successfully testing a new version on a selected group of Facebook users.
The new version of the Search feature will allow users to search the previous 30 days of News Feeds for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes that have been posted by people in their friends list and also the pages that they have chosen to become fans of.
The new feature will also allow users to search posts of people on the social networking site that they do not know and that they are not friends with, as long as those people have chosen for their content to be available to all.
The search results returned for each search query will now include relevant Facebook pages, groups and applications alongside people’s profiles.
The Search box can be found in the top right hand corner of each Facebook page and when a query is entered the user will be provided with the relevant results along with the option to filter the results to only see posts from friends or from everyone. Also with the option to filter by person, page, application or group, depending on what the user is looking for.
Facebook hope that by users being able to search more content on the site that they will be able to easily find out what their friends are up to and what they are talking about and what they and other people on Facebook recommend when it comes to restaurants, companies, brands etc.
They will be rolling out these changes over the next few days so we can all expect to see them soon and although this new Search feature can only be an improvement on the last one, we can only think that both Facebook and Microsoft are missing an opportunity by not integrating their services.
However Facebook has recently purchased the website FriendFeed, a service designed for sharing online, which they hope will help them compete with Twitter.
Facebook has previously been rejected in it’s quest to purchase Twitter and as Facebook realise it’s dominance in the Social Network market, it is therefore trying to become more Twitter-like. Facebook hope this new purchase will help put Twitter in it’s place, as FriendFeed recently added it’s real-time search tool, which closely resembles Twitter search, allowing Facebook to become more real-time.
