From being the social-networking giant, Facebook is now looking to seriously delve in the search engine business. The first hint of this new company direction was found in the mysterious photograph posted by Mark Zuckerberg on his Facebook wall, post the IPO filing by the company.
This photograph showed his desk and a MacBook Air. The laptop display had a blurry image of a Facebook page and, at the top, what seemed to be an unusually large white box; leading to speculations by tech press that it was the prototype search engine from the company.
Facebook has long stayed away from traditional search and the existing Facebook search is mainly used to find other users, pages on the site and to show web results powered by Microsoft's Bing. All this is rumoured to be changing in an upcoming update by the company, as a team led by former Google engineer Lars Rasmussen is working on an improved search engine, reported
Bloomberg.
This upcoming search engine won't be directly competing with Google in algorithmic supremacy but will use Facebook's social data to sift through web content and give relevant results. Given the criticism to Google's recent attempt to integrate social into search, it would be interesting to see Facebook's socially inclined search engine. Experts believe that Facebook might have more success given its natural strengths in adding social to web elements like the popular "like button".
Another interesting part to this whole saga is the involvement of former Google engineer Lars Rasmussen, who was previously a part of Google Wave and Maps teams.