
Facebook | Do we really need to write our own search engine? - dawie
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2535632130
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nanijoe
In theory, if everyone had a facebook profile, wouldn't a facebook search be
more useful than a google search in many instances? I don't think the search
has to be difficult to be useful. A facebook search can certainly provide more
contextual (and by extension, more useful) information than a google search.
The question is, how large of a context do you want your search to touch?

I think that the size of the facebook (or myspace) user population can grow to
such a point that internal search becomes a serious substitute for a more
general search with an engine like google or yahoo.

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willarson
I think the trend you are pointing out is already in full force: often you'll
jump over to Wikipedia directly, or IMDB to get data on movies. It is really
easy to make search work when individuals format their own data into a
specific format for usage by your search engine. This keeps on being useful
until people start abusing it. In a social app like facebook it seems
relatively less rewarding to abuse the system though.

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staunch
"Search engine" is an amazingly ambiguous term, to the point of being almost
meaningless. It can refer to anything from a one-line SQL query to Google's
system. Searching data that's completely under your control just isn't very
difficult in general. When money is no object it's usually trivial, just throw
memory at it. I look forward to the many clueless articles claiming this is a
challenge to Google.

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bilbo0s
Uh ohh . . .

