Interactive Marketing Blog

Couple of months back, I wrote a post about “Can social networking sites survive without Search“. There I mentioned that if future social sites can survive without evolved search feature integrated within it?

Fast forward now, Facebook revealed today that they are testing new versions of Facebook Search with a small group who will be able to find content from the people, organizations and public figures that matters as soon as they share it on Facebook.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, that social search in most SNS are not worth mentioning but venturing into search domain, although encapsulated in a so-called closed system can provide lot of value to in-house users, especially those who let their content available for others to see.

The very idea lies beneath these – The people around us are a powerful source for finding information about new and interesting information — from the latest on last night’s episode of “The Office” and suggestions on what to do for your next vacation to current events.

Also for example, I’m interested in the latest updates on the aftermath of the Iranian election. By entering the term “Iran” in the “Search” field in the upper-right corner of any page on Facebook, I will see up-to-the-minute results from my friends and the Facebook Pages of which I’m a fan, not to mention people who have chosen to make their profile and content available to everyone. I’m able to discover what blogs and news sources my friends are following, what my friends are saying about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and how people in general are reacting to the election results.

Though search industry is more or less been classified into 2 primary categories – one being static search results what Google, Yahoo or Bing gives and the other being the most talked about real-time search which Twitter or Friendfeed gives but with this development a new type of searchology emerges which tends to give relevant, real-time and authentic results since it comes from our near and dear ones. But there’s always a catch – one being users with less friends can’t use this feature much to their use and the individual privacy norms has to be laxed. Though on the hindsight, I think Facebook will be a clear winner!