Facebook's New Search Tool May Pose Threat To Google Search!

Tuesday, September 02, 2014:  A new Facebook tool is in its testing phase which will allow users to search for posts by keywords. Some Facebook users, according to Bloomberg report, have been given an option on their mobile app to search for old posts from their Facebook friends.

Facebook has emailed a statement to Bloomberg stating that the experiment is "improvement to search on mobile." No indication is still there whether the keyword search will roll out to all users or Facebook will launch it for desktop sites only. A very important aspect for the site is Facebook Search as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier that "Search for Facebook is going to be a multiyear voyage."

An expanded version of Facebook Search is considered as a powerful tool, even so powerful that it can pose challenge to the search engine tycoon Google. In Q4 2013 earnings call, Zuckerberg hinted that allowing users to search through Facebook's vast amount of content would be highly valuable for the site. He stated, "There are more than a trillion status updates and unstructured text posts and photos and pieces of content that people have shared over the past 10 years, and indexing that was a really big deal, because as the number of people on the team who have worked on web search engines in the past have told me, a trillion pieces of content is more than the index in any web search engine."

However, privacy campaigners are likely to oppose a search system on Facebook. A $16 million lawsuit is under the court ruling in a European court which has sought damages from Facebook. Facebook was sued for "unlawful" introduction of Graph Search, along with other allegations. In March 2013 the limited Graph Search function was released and it allowed users to perform basic searches or go through specific pages.