Facebook Adds Popular News Articles To Search Results

It’s sort of a baby step in Facebook’s efforts to improve its search results, but certainly worth noting here: Facebook is now showing news articles in its search results and ranking them by how many “likes” and “shares” the articles have received from Facebook users. The All Facebook blog says the number of friends who […]

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It’s sort of a baby step in Facebook’s efforts to improve its search results, but certainly worth noting here: Facebook is now showing news articles in its search results and ranking them by how many “likes” and “shares” the articles have received from Facebook users. The All Facebook blog says the number of friends who liked/shared an item also impacts the ranking.

Using the search box atop my Facebook profile to search for “Google,” I get a dropdown with these results.

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The rankings don’t appear to be based exactly on number of likes/shares, because the top result seems to have been shared by seven people, while the second result seems to have been shared by 19.

It’s also worth mentioning that these result only show up in the dropdown below the search box. If you actually complete your search without choosing one of the items from the dropdown, the following search results page is a completely different experience with no news articles to be found.

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There’s more discussion on Techmeme.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Matt McGee
Contributor
Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.

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