Facebook Search, not something that comes to mind when when we think of search. Search is for the big guys, Google and Bing. Facebook Search is not as robust and the results are incredibly limited, but then again they are not a search engine. They are a social networking platform that we cannot get enough of. We search for friends, brands, new pages that we can like, games, apps, etc. We expect that a search on Facebook will yield results that we are seeking to find new items on Facebook. Facebook just made the search results more organized by creating categories to aid us in finding what we are looking for.
Facebook Creates Categories for Search Results
The search results are very similar to Google Instant as when you start typing letters for the words that you are using as your search criteria, results start to appear and change with each letter depending upon the query. Some of the most popular categories are shared links, pages, groups, apps and people.
The categories do not always appear in the same order and it is unknown if the results are predetermined. It is very convenient when you are looking for a certain brand or looking at the competition (locally or nationally) and what keywords/phrases they are appearing for or searching by their name to see if they have a presence. Some of the searches performed produced friends, potential friends where as others did not show any friends. It is important to note that the option of "See more results for search" are not categorized. It was interesting to see the results from a myriad of searches from carpet, search, small business and Google that were performed. It is definitely useful when you are searching for a specific page on Facebook.
Are the pages that are appearing in the search results an indication of what will appear in search results on the search engines? Are the links we share because they are being shared on Facebook starting to have more weight? We already know that the search engines are including results from the social signals so they have to account for something. Will this change the way that you share links? Is this just going to be another Facebook popularity contest?