August 13, 2009
New Facebook Search
Facebook Cranks Out New Search Offerings, ResearchBuzz (Aug 12)
There have been several notices about the new Facebook search (with hype, as always) which I have been doing my best to ignore.
Tara Calishain looked at it and said "the search is too limited in time and content. I do see however that it could be useful. "
That's fairly generous.
According to the Facebook blog entry - Facebook Search Improved for Everyone - (which I could only find using a site search in Google) -
"You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you're a fan. If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people's profiles as well as relevant Facebook Pages, groups and applications"
Of course the content of those news feeds will depend on the crowd you hang out with on Facebook. Hang with political activitists and you'll get political issues; hang with pub crowd and you'll get ???
Now because Facebook will pick up public content you might find businesses, or causes (of whatever stripe) who are advertising and promoting.
There is a search box in the upper right corner of the Facebook page. Put in 1 or 2 keywords (forget anything advanced).
Also decide on what you want to search and select from the left: People, Pages, Groups, Applications, Events, Web, Posts.
Then on that page of results you can Filter using one of the terms in the drop-down box. This image shows group results for facebook search
I used the web search too - no results; and posting results were hopeless.
But, much to my surprise, the language you are queued up to search in makes a difference. Facebook assumes that I am English (UK) - Bing has the same problem in interpreting Bell IP numbers in Toronto, Ont. When I change language to English (US), the results change. There is also English (Pirate) - which would be what?, and Francais Canada - with some English results. What would be wrong with having a real language filter: English, French, German ...?
Facebook Search, although better, doesn't make Facebook a research resource. There are limits - 30 days, the types of postings that people make (often trivial), and the self-promotion. Use it find a group, check what an advocacy organization is up to, and watch the interests of your selected few - if you have time - but don't expect to find much more than today's buzz.
ResearchBuzz also mentions Facebook Lexicon for searching on frequency a term is being used on walls. Lots of talk about swine flu, very little on environmental issues.
Posted by Gwen at August 13, 2009 12:35 PM