from Hacker News

Fortunes of Facebook May Hinge on Searches

by priley on 1/15/13, 5:15 PM with 14 comments

• by neumann_alfred on 1/15/13, 5:35 PM

  Imagine a Facebook that actually revolved around letting users create, organize and find "personal content" -- with none of the arbitrary filtering of the "stream", and paying for increased video/photo storage and turning ads off. There, done? I still wouldn't like it as much as proper self-hosted netizens as the baseline; but as much as I "hate facebook" I'd be happy about that. Are they really making that much more money via ads? Why is it not possible to turn the huge success of Facebook into something that has no slimy undertones at all? I really don't get it.

• by purplelobster on 1/15/13, 8:35 PM

  I don't get it, what kinds of use cases are they envisioning for "social search" and why would people use them? Search what movies my friends like? People who list movies on Facebook are the ones I don't want movie tips from. Search who lives in what city? If I don't know that already, then it's not likely I'd want to connect with them again. Maybe there are usages that make sense, but what are they?

• by douglasisshiny on 1/15/13, 10:54 PM

  Maybe this is naive of me to say, but wouldn't it be wise for Facebook to focus on new/different products, some of which may not be directly or even tangentially related to its core product. Isn't the goal to eventually diversify your revenue streams?

  Granted, 95 percent (or more) of Google's profit comes from search, so they're not exactly exemplar of diversification. But they do have a range of products, some of which are beginning to generate solid revenue (Google Apps comes to mind).

• by gesman on 1/15/13, 10:20 PM

  I always hated google' urge to skew objective search for information with results derived from social networks using my cookies or currently logged in accounts.

  Now i got into habit of using chrome in private mode to actually Google for information.

  Google is great for indexing and search global information database, Facebook is great for social connectivity and sharing.

  No need to breed cat and dog into universal pet or judge that cat just become a better pet.

• by alxndr on 1/15/13, 6:16 PM

  Facebook is announcing a (supposedly) context and privacy aware search feature right now, livetweet from ars: http://live.arstechnica.com/facebook-january-event-liveblog-...

• by danso on 1/15/13, 6:26 PM

  One possible step in social-search would be to allow users to full-text search (with smart keywords) their own timelines: that is, anything that they themselves have ever posted, along with comments from their friends.

  By now, the average facebook user has accumulated so much "stuff" that it's hard to find certain memories...for example, you remember the caption of a photo (e.g. "kiss + in front of Times Square") but you can't find the photo because you have 20+ albums (which are incredibly hard to navigate). Search would help greatly here. And having filters to just look at all the times that you posted a relationship status, talked about a popular TV show, etc. would be great.

  I don't know where FB could go next with this, though. Allowing that kind of search across all your Facebook network would be like the original News Feed controversy (years ago), times 10. I noticed that years after it launched, the feature to see the history between you and a friend is still buried. It's quite useful, but if it were more prominent, people would see it as very stalkerish (i.e. people checking on their significant others' interactions with friends they suspect of being possible cheaters)

• by thecurator on 1/15/13, 7:31 PM

  unclear to me if this works. they're trying to build a revenue model, yet it's becoming overburdened with features. issue is right now, there is no real viable alternative (someone should build one), so users won't leave. anyway, this is zuckerberg pandering to the stock market - if your stock trades at 60x earnings, there's a lot of profit you need to fill up. and so far... this ain't enough.

• by walshemj on 1/15/13, 10:09 PM

  It also has a tie up with Bing for supplementary results /follow on searches this could hurt Googles market share.

  I wonder if Larry,Eric or Sergey have thrown any chairs though a window :-)