14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has been doing a 180 when it comes to privacy and data openness lately and it is moving further down that path with its newfound focus on search. It has recently introduced a larger and more central search box and now it's giving search suggestions a revamp hopefully making them more relevant for users. In the best-case scenario, most users won't even have to actually do the search and go to the search results page, the suggestions should already have the results they are looking for.
"[T]oday we are rolling out an improvement to Search to help you quickly find and connect with the people, Pages, groups, events and applications you care about," Wayne Kao, a Facebook engineer, wrote. "Now as you're typing in a query in the search bar, you will instantaneously see results not only of the people, events, groups and Pages you're connected with but also the connections of your friends and globally relevant results," he explained.
Until now, the search suggestions only worked for people you were already friends with, so, if you started typing their name, their profile would come up. This was useful to a degree, but rather limited. Given that suggestions are now a big feature on any search engine and even in the browser's search box, it was time for an upgrade.
The new suggestion feature brings the best of both worlds. It prioritizes people, events or other things you are already in contact with, but will also show results from your extended network and stuff like public pages or profiles. The feature is being rolled out over the next few days, as it is usually the case with a site its size, but should be available for everyone soon.
While most people don't associate Facebook with search, its sheer size means that any feature or tool on the social network is going to be huge. For example, Facebook is the world's largest photo-sharing and -hosting site, despite not having a dedicated service. Facebook's own search engine is now so large, that it's competing with some of the top players in search, in terms of volume, sites like Aol and Ask.