With talk of the Facebook search model dominating SEO news the last few days, people are wondering how it is really going to work. Facebook isn’t like Google or Bing indexing the entire web, so there are questions as to what kind of value it may have. As Facebook search works now, if it can be called functional really, it takes into consideration only your friends to create recommendations for you . With the average user having about 190 friends, that is pretty insufficient to work with. That will change.
What Facebook plans to do is extend search out to first degree connections meaning friends of friends but not beyond that. At least that holds true for what has been discussed thus far and makes sense. The argument against this has been that you likely don’t know people that are friends of your friends so recommendations may be bit wonky. On the other hand, it’s likely you don’t know the people doing reviews on most any site on the web so your odds of a relevant return may actually be better.
It isn’t believed that Facebook search will be terribly popular at first, nor is expected to come off without some major engineering problems. Some question if perhaps Facebook is pushing a little too fast for a little too much. With investors expecting returns and G+ being a growing nuisance to the user pool, Facebook does have to do something big to improve the UI and they need to do it now rather than later.
Tags: facebook search, IPO, seo news
