Monday, May 10, 2010

Bada Bing for Facebook

In class we touched on the question of what service facebook utilizes to power their search functionality. At inception, Facebook was powered by an inefficient homegrown search engine. Subsequently, it utilized Microsoft Live and since then the technology has undergone a number of changes in form and in partnerships. Most recently Facebook announced in February 2010 that it would take over responsibility for selling its own display advertisement and also said that Bing would exclusively power their web results. After Bing took over, .comscore reported that Facebook’s U.S. search queries grew 48% in the following month giving Facebook a 2.7% market share, just below Ask.com’s 3.1%. Simultaneously Facebook redesigned their website to make the search feature more prominent. Recent drama has included rumors that status updates will appear in search results. I googled, bing-ed and Facebook-searched my own status. The only one that showed results was the Facebook search. I would be interested to hear others’ feedback. Do you use Facebook search for anything other than searching for specific people? I do not, but I suppose that it would be an excellent (and free) tool for marketers. -Melissa

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I don't actually use Facebook search for anything other than finding people -- but I guess just outs me as not that into Facebook...