Facebook Adds Public Posts To Search, More Frequent Updates May Be Coming

Facebook has announced some incremental search improvements and a new “channel” for its newsroom (Search FYI) that will provide updates on the evolution of search at Facebook. This suggests to me that we’ll be seeing more “search activity” going forward. In a blog post announcing the improvements, Tom Stocky, Facebook’s VP of Search, said that […]

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Facebook has announced some incremental search improvements and a new “channel” for its newsroom (Search FYI) that will provide updates on the evolution of search at Facebook. This suggests to me that we’ll be seeing more “search activity” going forward.

In a blog post announcing the improvements, Tom Stocky, Facebook’s VP of Search, said that the company sees “over 1.5 billion searches per day and over 2 trillion posts in our index.”

Facebook said that as of today users will see or be able to:

  • More timely and more personalized search suggestions (There apparently will be a real-time dimension to the suggestions, as with big stories or news events)
  • The ability to search public posts, as well as friends’ posts (In December, the company rolled out the ability to search friends’ posts)
  • Search public conversations

About the latter item, Facebook said, “When a link gets shared widely on Facebook, it often anchors an interesting public conversation. Now there’s a new way to quickly dive into that discussion. With one tap, you can find public posts about a link, see popular quotes and phrases mentioned in these posts, and check out an aggregate overview of sentiment.”

These updates are going to be first available in (US) English for iOS, Android and the PC. It’s mostly about mobile, however, which drives 87 percent of daily active usage and 76 percent of ad revenue (Q2).


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About the author

Greg Sterling
Contributor
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.

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