Facebook announced today on its official blog the introduction of a new improvement to the auto-suggest search feature. The new enhancement makes it much easier for Facebook users to find exactly what they are looking for by suggesting people, groups, and pages that you are not yet connected with. The new auto-suggested results includes connections from your friends and other relevant results on the Facebook network.
The new enhancement has already started rolling out gradually, which means it might be a couple of days before all users actually get to see the new feature. Now, those who are lucky enough to have received the new feature will notice more auto-suggest results in the drop-down menu when typing in the search bar. As mentioned above, the new feature will suggest more relevant results based on your friends connections.
This isn’t the first time Facebook is using data in this type of fashion –- for example, users are already accustomed to seeing suggestions of people to friend based on mutual connections, and ads for Fan Pages will tell you which of your friends are already fans.
The idea with search seems to be that pulling suggestions from your extended network, which presumably has lots of like-minded people in it, will get you to what you’re looking for faster. At this point, it’s tough to say how well it works, since the feature isn’t live for everyone and is being rolled out gradually over the next few days.
Do you think this approach to search will yield better results? Let us know what you think in the comments.