BREAKING: Facebook Now Displaying All Liked News Articles In Search Results
Another big upgrade from Facebook: the company is currently testing search results which display articles ranked by likes. Additionally, the results for searches now shows the results from all around the web based on two things …
Context & Ripple Effects
The corpus gives little run-up to this test — no prior stories set the stage — but the confirmed claims around it do: Facebook's search is expanding to show results from across the web, and the experiment now ranks news articles by how many people have liked them. That puts the Like button, until now a sharing mechanic, into the position of a ranking signal for open-web content.
The timing matters against Facebook's other moves in early September 2010: the company is [[a:none|recruiting Google employees]] amid rapid growth, and has spent late August enforcing its brand through legal action against Teachbook and Placebook. A search product that competes for web queries is consistent with a company positioning itself against Google on more than hiring.
First-order effects
- Publishers gain a new referral surface: articles that accumulate likes can surface in Facebook search results ranked by engagement rather than by query keywords alone.
- Google faces the first serious attempt to rank web results with a social graph behind them — from a competitor that is simultaneously poaching its engineers.
Second-order effects
- If likes influence search visibility, publishers have a direct incentive to place Like buttons prominently and to optimize headlines and topics for likability, mirroring how they already optimize for link-based SEO.
- Queries that users might otherwise take to Google stay inside Facebook, shifting advertising-relevant search volume toward whichever platform holds both the intent and the ranking signal.
Third-order effects
- Search could bifurcate into two ranking regimes — the link graph versus the engagement graph — with publishers forced to serve both masters if likes prove durable as a discovery channel.
- Regulators and privacy advocates gain a new surface to scrutinize: ranking the open web by named individuals' liking behavior ties public search results to personal activity graphs.
The trend: Search ranking is starting to absorb social engagement signals, converting the Like button from a sharing tool into a distribution and ranking currency.