Taking another shot at Twitter

Aug 11, 2009 08:18 GMT  ·  By

Facebook is making one major announcement after another and, just hours after the company announced it had acquired social aggregator site FriendFeed, the social network is launching a new real-time search engine, which has been in the works for the past couple of months, having started public testing in June. The new search engine is a major improvement and, even without the real-time features, brings a lot of new functionality.

“Last month, we began testing new versions of Search with a small group of people on Facebook. Based on the success of those tests, we're rolling out a new version of Search to everyone on the site beginning today,” Akhil Wable, a Facebook engineering manager, wrote. “We hope that these improvements to Search will help you connect with and find information about the people and things you care about more easily. We're rolling these changes out over the course of the next few days, so you may not see the new results just yet.”

The upgraded feature allows users to search their own news feed, for the past 30 days, for status updates and content like photos, videos, links or other shared items. This works for all of the users' friends and the Facebook Pages they are fans of but the new search also enables them to look for status updates, links or notes from other Facebook users that have decided to make their shared content public. Still, even with the new focus on content, the search will still include profiles or Pages as well as groups and Facebook apps.

Users can start a search using the box on the right hand side upper corner after which they will be greeted with a revamped result page. By default the results will come from all categories and users will be able to better refine them using the filter in the new left sidebar. Most of the categories are self-explanatory but there are some notable changes like the fact that Live.com has been replaced by Bing, Microsoft's rebranded and improved search engine, in the Web Results category.

The biggest feature, even though it’s the last category, is “Posts by Everyone,” which is Facebook's first step in real-time search. While just at the beginning and with most users likely not sharing their updates publicly, Facebook has a big chance of becoming a major player in the market, even dominating it, thanks to its 250 million users, a number that still greatly outweighs Twitter's.