Facebook Soups Up Search

Facebook Soups Up Search
Everybody's favorite waste of time is adding a new source of distraction: Facebook is upgrading its search tool to find far more of the content generated by the sprawling social network's 250-million-plus users.
The new search, as outlined in this post on Facebook's blog, encompasses not just the massive social network's more-or-less fixed landmarks--the personal profiles of friends, family members and random acquaintances; public pages by companies, organizations and public figures; groups set up to discuss one thing or another; and all those ridiculous applications you can add to your own profile--but most of its more transient fare:
You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you're a fan. If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends.
About the only content that that the new search doesn't seem to cover is comments on updates, notes and photos or videos. So what's it good for? For one thing, this tool makes it easier to ego-surf. Type in your name, click the "Posts by Everyone" link in the left-hand column, and see all the strangers who have been chattering about you in their public posts... which in my case, amounts to all of one person.
Ahem.
But the new search can also help you catch up on chatter you might have missed. For example, when I limited my solipsistic query to updates by friends, I discovered that an old neighbor had noticed my quoting a song lyric in a status update, knew the song's author and called that to his attention on his own profile. That's kind of cool.
Like Twitter's search, Facebook's works in real time--I don't see any real lag between somebody posting something and those words showing up in a search. That, coupled with Facebook's acquisition of the Twitter-esque social-media site FriendFeed yesterday, has some industry observers seeing this move as Facebook's latest attempt to thwart Twitter's growth.
I don't know that a better, faster search will help Facebook in that quest. The fact that by default, you don't need to manage friends lists on Twitter makes that a better way to share your thoughts with the world (note to PR people: you're better off trying to connect with me on Twitter than on Facebook) before you even get into finer points like search tools.
But that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate the new search on Facebook. Have you tried it? If so, please post your review in the comments.
var entrycat = 'Digital culture, The Web'
By Rob Pegoraro | August 12, 2009; 11:52 AM ETCategories: Digital culture , The Web Share This: E-Mail | Technorati | Del.icio.us | Digg | Stumble Previous: Roku Player Brings MLB.TV to the TV