Comments on: A Wish List for Facebook Search

By: Glen Tyler Jennings

Glen Tyler Jennings — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 05:42:00 +0000

Facebook search STILL sucks three years since you have written this. I am trying to find this guy I just met at my university and I know his first AND last name spelled correctly. I type it in the search bar and don’t see the picture he said was his prof pic and I don’t see any pictures of him, so I click see more. It pulls up TONS of crap I don’t care about so I click “People” under search filters. It pulls up “people you may know” and no one even NAMED this guys’ first name.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:03:30 +0000

Facebook is at the cutting edge for a lot of things, but especially in terms of web development. I am a web developer and I’ve built a micro search engine for a commercial site before – it’s pretty complex, but completely doable. Facebook has taken way too long to implement a proper search feature (accessing all parts of the FB experience) they must really be thingking hard about this one. Keep a close eye on this function – it’s going to revolutionise the way we search.

By: Brendan

Brendan — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:41:30 +0000

Alright - here goes.

Search Conversations! Millions of people discussing their thoughts on brands and products, companies and industries??? GOLD!

Search on people could be improved. EG I search on John Smith - I can't set up an advanced search to say only John Smith's in my home town. I can filter by school/Uni OR Groups!! What If I don;'t know the school uni or group!?!? Pointless

Image searches woul be good however I see that images are copyrighted belongings of other people and while there are a lot of decent recognition softwares around, I'm not sure I'd want people viewing my images.

By: Eric Negler

Eric Negler — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:20:16 +0000

It is interesting that companies always have to build these apps when they are available elsewhere. Are they trying to create IP or are they convinced (halo effect)they are going to revolutionize the social networking monetization model?

People search with cool UIs are everywhere - here's one:

http://miiget.labs.exalead.com/

Image search/recognition at such large volumes is really, really, computationally intensive (more and more servers, power and cooling). There are a number of third party products that can identify like images with a confidence interval over 50%.

However it seems that building is always the default approach and there is little concern over time to market (or revenue).

By: Steven Schwartz

Steven Schwartz — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:27:08 +0000

I enjoy Facebook at its best as one of the most interesting cocktail parties I have ever been at. Secondly as adult show and tell. FB search has to be contextual to topic, image, or other media. Huge challenge since the data is not flattened. I would extend Bill Fischers suggestion and provide an API for developers to create and update their own contextually driven local sub-indexes.

By: Gabe

Gabe — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 01:48:44 +0000

Facebook users are adding photos at a rate of 850 million photos a month, if they have a better UI/UE & search around photos, I’d give up my flickr pro acct. and never look back

By: bill fischer

bill fischer — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:53:24 +0000

Instead of trying to guess the ultimate utility of FB status search, the proper weighting of the social graph in the relevancy algorithm, and the best UI for SERPS, why not just set up an API and let thousands of developers guess and let the marketplace decide?

Bill
@williamfischer

By: bill fischer

bill fischer — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:51:33 +0000

Bill
@williamfischer

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:36:46 +0000

Let start with the present tense. The current Facebook search sucks. The beta is an improvement, but John is spot-on in saying that “Facebook search circa 2009 is akin to Alta Vista search circa 1994″.

Facebook certainly has access to some content that Google / Yahoo / Microsoft can’t lay their grubby paws on. But they’re also missing a lot–Google’s search logs, in particular, are a gold-mine, and Google gets the “stream” of searches in “real time”. Scare quotes just to remind everyone that neither Twitter nor Facebook have a monopoly on the present tense.

I’m no Google fan boy (read my blog if you need to be convinced of that), and I see a lot to be improved in their approach. In fact, I think Microsoft has the right idea in positioning Bing as a “decision engine” positioning–if only Microsoft could actually deliver on that positioning. And I am interested in conversation as a signal, though I’m more intrigued by Topsy than by the native search Twitter and Facebook have produced.

Folks, do your homework. And read posts before commenting on them.

By: iPhone

iPhone — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:51:14 +0000

I am *sure* the company is deep in planning on how to take its search to a new level – no small feat, given the size and scope of its service. What matters most to me (in most cases) is what my friends know about a given topic, not what google’s bots have found on the web. Google can’t do that because they don’t know which of your friends knows that person nor where you went to school or another. I can link to it. Here’s a link to a Google search for “graffiti application,” for example.