Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook announced the arrival of ‘Social search’ an alliance between Facebook and the Bing search engine.
What does this mean, and how does it affect us as consumers?
You can now search Facebook and type in specific queries that will return results taken directly from friends, photos, places and interests.
Imagine being on holiday, and you are looking for a restaurant, but can’t decide where to eat. This feature makes the decision making process much faster:
1. You search on your mobile for “Friends recommendations eat out in Las Vegas”
2. You see a series of updates from Facebook friends who have previously posted about Las Vegas restaurants.
3. Your friends have inadvertently provided a restaurant recommendation.
It’s early days for Social Search and people tend to use Facebook to talk to friends, it may not replace the famous “Google-it” search. The jury is out on whether private images shared between family and friends should be so readily accessed by Facebook.
Facebook users need to pay close attention to privacy settings ensuring they mark personal photos to private.