Facebook is primarily the place we go to share posts and links, like our friend’s pictures, and, in general, socialize. But Mark Zuckerberg also seems to think there is untapped potential in Facebook’s search capabilities. The social network gets one billion search queries every day, a number that cannot be ignored by the founder of the company.
Zuckerberg feels that the search results provided by Facebook are unique—“There’s huge potential. There are a lot of questions that only Facebook can answer, that the other services aren’t going to be able to answer for you.” Facebook uses a unique system for search: the Facebook Graph Search. Their search engine, which has been in use since March 2013, uses the searcher’s friends and interests in combination with a traditional search algorithm to provide more “personalized” results than the other search engines.
Facebook’s problem with having an effective search engine that maintains its unique, personalized flavor is the size of its own network. The site would like to take advantage of all its information, but with over a trillion posts, that will take some work. Zuckerberg realizes that its full search capabilities could “still be years away”, but the power of an effective search engine combined with Facebook’s wealth of information should not be ignored.