What You Need To Know About Facebook’s Search Amendments

• It’s a personal search experience, it is geared towards encouraging debate, engagement and a play to keep users on the Facebook platform and steal a little more attention from Twitter, YouTube and reduce the number of searches are made on Google.
• Facebook are going to return results in a “hierarchical list”
• The search results will include friends posts
• There are over 200 factors reported to be taken into consideration
• Results are going to split into four layers:
  Top, Latest, People, and Photos. Expect video to be included next year.
• Facebook are looking for this to encourage more public posts and IMHO will see a peak for first six months
• Only (non friends) public posts will appear within search results, the private statuses or statuses only shared with selected friends will not appear (unless you are tagged into the update).
• This is a completely personal experience for the 1.45 billion Facebook users, results will be completely different for every person
• Pages will appear, depending on your affinity and the amount you engage with the page depends on how it will appear within search results
• Historical posts will be available in search results, Facebook have suggested time is a core factor
• This is definitely social search done right. News from friends, with most updated content appearing first – it’s the social search experience we would want. It is definitely the next phase on from existing Twitter search and Google personalised results experiences.
• Search is location sensitive, location will obviously change but looking for specific events will bring up different results.
• Facebook search is based on authority, the more authoritative to appear higher in the results, for the SEO’s it could be related to author rank but will operate different and Facebook’s understand this more than Google ever did.
• Currently three million links are shared hourly (Brian Boland from Facebook) and is a lot of content to sort through constantly, this is why adding dedicated text (commentary) and a link will be important to users and Facebook. Dumping links and re-sharing posts will be harder to rank for Facebook.
• Friend affinity is vital – as rightly pointed out by Stephen Kenwright on Twitter, the hardest battle for users (and for Facebook to work out) will be old friends, extra opinionated school friends and those who update far more than others.
  Brands will want to push URL shares and recommend some commentary, make your sharers be more relevant with their friends.
  Friends who want to be smart will update their public statuses with the information they want to appear for and that will get them the most amount of engagement
• Mobile searches can be refreshed by pulling down, the likelihood is the results will be different upon refresh
• Link / share relevancy and frequency will be vital for users.
• This reminds me of Pinterest’s recent search tweak but taken a step further
• I think this could be Facebook’s greatest engagement hack to date, even challenging unbundling messenger.
• This is definitely the next phase of search and look forward to seeing how brands will leverage this

Facebook’s video for new Facebook Search

Some Impressive Facebook Facts
Facebook has over 1 billion active daily users
Facebook dominates both Android and iOS
Facebook have 2 trillion search to work through
There are 3 million links shared hourly
Facebook will roll out to English (US) users and across iOS, Android and desktop users

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