How Serious Is Facebook About Search?
An article in BusinessWeek suggests that Facebook is planning a deeper push into search. Will that be limited to improving search for the site — or will it be something more comprehensive? — It's clear that Facebook needs better internal search.
Context & Ripple Effects
The question of whether Facebook is serious about search is nearly as old as its search box itself — back in November 2007, its expanded search already prompted speculation about taking on Google, and a July 2007 Facebook blog post openly debated why it needed to write its own engine at all. The through-line sharpened in March 2011, when a new Facebook patent around "curated search", built on likes and user signals, hinted the company saw its social graph itself as a ranking layer.
What changed this week is timing and scale: BusinessWeek reported on March 29 that Facebook is planning a deeper push into search, possibly beyond fixing on-site search — and that report landed two days after Facebook filed its intention to raise $5 billion in what would likely be the largest tech IPO in history, with the final SharesPost auction lifting its implied valuation to $102.8 billion. The pickup was broad — Business Insider, Mashable, WebProNews and others all ran the story within a day — because investors parsing the S-1 want to know if search is a real growth lever or a line item.
First-order effects
- Facebook's own engineers face an immediate mandate to fix demonstrably weak internal site search — the one part of the rumor analysts treat as settled fact — while the broader scope remains unconfirmed by the company.
- Google and Bing now have a plausible new entrant to price against: a search product ranked on Facebook's like and friendship data would compete for queries the open-web engines can't see.
Second-order effects
- With a $5 billion IPO in motion and a $102.8 billion implied valuation, any credible search ambition becomes part of the equity story — giving underwriters and investors a second monetization narrative beyond display ads, and raising the bar for what Facebook must show post-listing.
- Advertisers and SEO practitioners would have to plan for a second query stream split between web results and social-graph results, pressuring the keyword-auction economics that fund incumbent search.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern from 2007's expansion through the 2011 curated-search patent holds, search fragments structurally: instead of one index of the open web, discovery splits across proprietary graphs — friends' activity, likes, app data — where platform owners control both the corpus and the ranking, a shift regulators and publishers would eventually have to confront.
- A confirmed move would also harden the walled-garden model: content optimized for Facebook's graph gains value only inside it, changing incentives for publishers deciding where to invest in discoverability.
The trend: Search is drifting from a single shared index of the open web toward platform-ranked discovery over proprietary social data, and Facebook's pre-IPO maneuvering is the clearest test yet of whether a graph can challenge a crawler.