4 ms·
The biggest problem is the lack of data about what people are searching. It's a catch-22 that's very hard to break in the face of Google's search dominance and
by Rauchg 11y ago
The biggest problem is the lack of data about what people are searching. It's a catch-22 that's very hard to break in the face of Google's search dominance and ubiquity.
By Google being the best, it only becomes better, and introduces a huge barrier to entry to competitors. It used to be possible to know what people were searching for to end up in a given Wikipedia article, but the process is now only asynchronous (and limited) through Webmaster tools[1]
In my mind, the most interesting aspect of the announcement should not be how much money they have to spend, but how they plan on solving this paradox.
[1] http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/60350 http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/60350
- rgovind 11y agoI think facebook should be able to build a search engine. Don't know why they don't have one yet
- dexwiz 11y agoFacebook wants a single platform to provide the Web through. If they built a search engine, it would only search Facebook.
- elmar 11y agoFacebook search is broken, twitter search works much better.
- patrickaljord 11y agoIt's only broken because most people share with their friends only and search cannot expose their posts. This makes real time search way less efficient than twitter.
- tallanvor 11y agoThat's what security trimming is for. You index everything, including the permissions for each item and provide the searcher's permissions (whether it's an acl, a claim, or some other form) as part of the query. Anonymous or unauthenticated users get a "public" claim that only returns results available to everyone.
- meowface 11y agoIt's intentionally broken. Despite many real (though also some exaggerated) counter-examples, Facebook does have features to protect privacy. One of those things is you generally can't get very useful results from search unless you're friends with someone, or a friend of a friend (depending on the user's privacy settings). You can't see general trends, or even search for every person with a given first and last name in an area, for example. It used to be more open, but they've heavily restricted the breadth of data returned from searches within the past few years.
- jarcane 11y agoIt can't even find anything in my own posts. If it's a permission problem, that's a pretty fuckin' serious permission problem right there. On top of which, Graph Search is still disabled inexplicably in many regions, for reasons which were never explained.
- newscracker 11y ago> It can't even find anything in my own posts. Ditto. I have seen this as a crippling deficiency in the Facebook platform. Not being able to search properly in my own posts or in the groups I'm a member of really sucks. For all the engineering prowess, open sourced tools, etc., shown by Facebook, the lack of a working search makes the company seem incompetent from the top down. Sometime ago I started storing important information (like others links, my own comments, etc.) outside of Facebook where I can find them easily. I also started a Facebook page and added Notes into it to make it easier to document, find and share things. It seems ridiculous that I'd have to do this just to have access to information, but that's been the sad state for years.
- boomzilla 11y agoFB search is terrible because there is no incentive for an engineering team to work on it, and in fact maybe quietly discouraged from doing so. FB make money on from the news feed, so any feature that distract users from scrolling down their feed will come up losing on an A/B test where ultimate metric is ad views and clicks.
- fuzzywalrus 11y agoThey already have a FaceBook search engine. I noticed when I start typing a friend's name in the search bar, my friend matches appear below pages that I haven't liked/discussions or if I search an artist I liked, other results appear above it in the quick search drop down. I haven't noticed sponsored search results but I'm sure they're working on it. Example of a search query URL. Verified pages appear to get more weight. https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=president https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=president
- imaginenore 11y agoKeyword Planner tool tells you what people search for.
- runholm 11y agoGoogle uses a highly sophisticated set of data and algorithms to determine what to present to who when they search for what from where. The algorithms are obviously secret, but any user paying a bit of attention will notice the results are clearly not generated from the text in the text field alone.
- conjectures 11y agoAlso, one might suppose, by being the best they may have become lazy in their core offering. That's what theory tells you about monopolies anyhow.