Facebook is working on a Search Engine!

At a TechCrunch Disrupt event, Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook pretty much confirmed that the company is working on a new search engine.

He can be quoted as saying

Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have. At some point we’ll do it. We have a team working on it.

source: techcrunch

Though there have always been rumours in the past that Facebook was getting into the search business. Facebook already handles 1 billion search queries, but it’s search features are hardly useful.

A Facebook search engine, could mean a lot more headaches to Google, which at the moment is not exactly setting the world on fire with Google+ in terms of popularity.

Why a Facebook search engine makes sense?

Facebook is a social network where people connect, share updates, photos and videos. At best people use Facebook search for finding their friends or even trending topics.

For making money, Facebook will have to serve up results to questions like best local restaurants or shops. Facebook has all the data to know personalized data like that

This gives Facebook a great deal of data to give great search related results.

But it will work for Facebook, only if it gets search right and currently even Bing is not exactly gaining much ground against Google despite pouring in billions into it.

4 Comments

Trika September 13, 2012

Wow,, appreciate to Facebook. Not only successful on social network, now their web developers also focus on search engine. More choices is more better I guess

jaswanth September 13, 2012

Great news, but no search engine will beats Google we know that fact, but facebook might 🙂 we cannot say_All the best to FB team.

Sreejesh September 14, 2012

Facebook Search engine would be a real smart idea unlike the Facebook phone they had planned. At this moment Google is not playing fair with its policies and has failed to improve the search experience. And they’re pushing more ads on every search query.
People were long time waiting for Facebook ads for publishers and this would be yet another thing the web world would expect to see.

Aditya Kane September 14, 2012

@Sreejesh: The point is do people want to use Facebook for searching. I use it to connect with friends/ share photos primarily – so my behavior on FB will need to change radically to start searching for things on it.