

Fortunes of Facebook May Hinge on Searches - priley
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/technology/fortunes-of-facebook-may-hinge-on-searches.html?_r=0

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neumann_alfred
Imagine a Facebook that actually revolved around letting users create,
organize _and_ find "personal content" -- with none of the arbitrary filtering
of the "stream", and paying for increased video/photo storage and turning ads
off. There, done? I still wouldn't like it as much as proper self-hosted
netizens as the baseline; but as much as I "hate facebook" I'd be happy about
that. Are they really making that much more money via ads? Why is it not
possible to turn the huge success of Facebook into something that has no slimy
undertones at all? I really don't get it.

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zht
it would be extremely difficult to sift through, by yourself, the collective
output of 300 of your facebook friends. Imagine having to sift through all of
the status updates, the pictures, the check ins, the timeline contents, the
photo tags, etc etc.

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neumann_alfred
That's what filters are for. For that of course users would need first
meaningful (!) tools to curate their own content; instead of just throwing
everything onto their profile in chronological order. Maybe some helpful
default suggestions that can be renamed and deleted at will, like "status
updates", "photos", "big events" or whatever. Even just that without any
"subcategories" or "tags" would be enough for a lot of cases, and where it's
not, you can put more effort into it.

Then it would still up to you as a "subscriber" to decide what of the things
you're allowed to see you do want to see on a regular basis; it would
generally be up to the user how lazy they want to be, and how much lazyness
they want to tolerate in their inbox. Don't tell me it's hard before it was
even tried?

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purplelobster
I don't get it, what kinds of use cases are they envisioning for "social
search" and why would people use them? Search what movies my friends like?
People who list movies on Facebook are the ones I don't want movie tips from.
Search who lives in what city? If I don't know that already, then it's not
likely I'd want to connect with them again. Maybe there are usages that make
sense, but what are they?

~~~
AustinGibbons
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5062938>

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douglasisshiny
Maybe this is naive of me to say, but wouldn't it be wise for Facebook to
focus on new/different products, some of which may not be directly or even
tangentially related to its core product. Isn't the goal to eventually
diversify your revenue streams?

Granted, 95 percent (or more) of Google's profit comes from search, so they're
not exactly exemplar of diversification. But they do have a range of products,
some of which are beginning to generate solid revenue (Google Apps comes to
mind).

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gesman
I always hated google' urge to skew objective search for information with
results derived from social networks using my cookies or currently logged in
accounts.

Now i got into habit of using chrome in private mode to actually Google for
information.

Google is great for indexing and search global information database, Facebook
is great for social connectivity and sharing.

No need to breed cat and dog into universal pet or judge that cat just become
a better pet.

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alxndr
Facebook is announcing a (supposedly) context and privacy aware search feature
right now, livetweet from ars: [http://live.arstechnica.com/facebook-january-
event-liveblog-...](http://live.arstechnica.com/facebook-january-event-
liveblog-january-15-1000-a-m-pst/)

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danso
One possible step in social-search would be to allow users to full-text search
(with smart keywords) their own timelines: that is, anything that they
themselves have ever posted, along with comments from their friends.

By now, the average facebook user has accumulated so much "stuff" that it's
hard to find certain memories...for example, you remember the caption of a
photo (e.g. "kiss + in front of Times Square") but you can't find the photo
because you have 20+ albums (which are incredibly hard to navigate). Search
would help greatly here. And having filters to just look at all the times that
you posted a relationship status, talked about a popular TV show, etc. would
be great.

I don't know where FB could go next with this, though. Allowing that kind of
search across all your Facebook network would be like the original News Feed
controversy ( _years_ ago), times 10. I noticed that years after it launched,
the feature to see the history between you and a friend is still buried. It's
quite useful, but if it were more prominent, people would see it as very
stalkerish (i.e. people checking on their significant others' interactions
with friends they suspect of being possible cheaters)

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natrius
I use Cue/Greplin for full-text social search. I use it primarily for finding
things I know I've seen in my news feed or on Twitter before. It works well.

<https://www.cueup.com/>

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thecurator
unclear to me if this works. they're trying to build a revenue model, yet it's
becoming overburdened with features. issue is right now, there is no real
viable alternative (someone should build one), so users won't leave. anyway,
this is zuckerberg pandering to the stock market - if your stock trades at 60x
earnings, there's a lot of profit you need to fill up. and so far... this
ain't enough.

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walshemj
It also has a tie up with Bing for supplementary results /follow on searches
this could hurt Googles market share.

I wonder if Larry,Eric or Sergey have thrown any chairs though a window :-)

