14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has just introduced a revamped search results page. The new page is not a major redesign, but brings the section in line with some of the more recent Facebook design trends.
The new search results page is now live for everyone and can be accessed by simply starting a search.
The new page is somewhat lighter, but it packs more functionality. By default, it will list all results from Facebook resources, people, pages, groups and so on.
The left sidebar enables you to filter your results to narrow down on the ones you need.
For general Facebook content, you can select between People, Pages, Groups, Applications and Events, which should cover pretty much all of the data you're going to find on the social network.
More interesting are the "Posts by Friends" and "Posts by Everyone filters," which you can probably guess what they do. You can also select the Web Results filter to show just the results from outside Facebook.
By default, below the regular results for people and pages, you also get some posts from friends that may contain the keywords you were searching for.
Finally, below those, you'll see results from the web, powered by Bing search as always.
One nice touch is the fact that you can Like pages or add people as friends straight from the search results.
The redesign is rather significant, but not big enough to trigger the kind of reactions the font size change did, or, at least, people haven't been complaining yet.
For Facebook, search represents a big opportunity, especially now that it has taken over the web at large with its Open Graph.
So far though, neither Facebook nor Bing have tapped into the great potential all the data the social network keeps amassing represents.