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Facebook Drops Bing Search Results
New submitter mrflash818 writes Facebook has dumped search results from Microsoft's Bing after the social networking giant earlier this week launched its own tool for finding comments and other information. According to Reuters, Facebook confirmed the move Friday. TechCrunch, drawing on the same Reuters story as VentureBeat, says "The report says that Facebook’s new search tool will give users the ability to filter through old comments and other information from friends. Facebook has been building out its search products for a long time, using Bing as an extra layer to provide results beyond the Interest Graph in an effort to avoid letting rival Google into the system."
I can't wait to hear the next juicy soap opera installment of As The Facebook Turns!
Knowing Facebook dropped Bing is about as relevant to daily life as knowing that a celebrity got a divorce. Not my business. Do. Not. Care.
Even trying to do a very simple thing, like search through all past facebook messages or group posts for a given word, is essentially impossible.
I dont know where Facebook thinks they are going with their "graph search", but as of today it is absolutely horrible.
Google is no better, with complete inability to search through Hangouts history without going into GMail of all places. You would think a search company would do better.
it's not so simple: "Big data"
They were using Bing? How quaint.
Screw all that baggage you bring up. Who cares?
I like products that use local versions of Google where I can start my search and suggestions come up and stuff.
Facebook search is as useless as tits on a boar hog. There's a lot of information in my personal world of Facebook and I'd like to be able to find it.
When I go to look for stuff, I sure as hell don't spend any time doing a goddam background check on the designers of the fucking engine.
That's another time-sucking hobby for those who are interested and having that knowledge doesn't enhance my search experience at all.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
It is my guess that this dropping of Bing by Facebook will erode Bing's search marketshare, which was only ~18%, according to a 2013 article.
http://www.searchenginejournal...
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
I love that it's impossible to get Facebook results when searching Google, I don't want to deal with Facebook anyway.
BEST. ACCIDENTAL GIFT. EVER.
Yeah, I have several friends who will post/share things on their wall to "find later." Yeah, there's pretty much no way you're going to find that later unless you manually scroll through pages and pages of old posts. Finding stuff on FB is darned near impossible, with their "search" being woefully inadequate.
It's worse than you thought. Weeks ago, my mother was looking for a conversation with someone who had passed away. I found that there's some sort of threshold problem snatching older posts (or certain categories of user conversations) out of userland.
First: I may be in the dark as a non-member, but neither Facebook's GUI and search tools nor my mother as a user have clear ideas of post categories. To find a keyword and look for the proper search option, it was a pain having to grill her just to find if she had posted the conversation on someone else's "wall", vs. her own, vs. under a picture, vs. a private message chain, vs. a Live chat. I even asked if this happened over Yahoo mail. Armed with a rare keyword I found that the search results had irrelevant posts plus one brief part of the conversation... most (or all) of the search results lacked links back to the posts.
My mother's conversation was from replies to a Status update she made. I think FB makes that data join her wall. River pagination is becoming a thing of the past, to the detriment of users who only have pointers to "now" and "the beginning of time" instead of a clean "x days ago" or "january, february" list option. Since everything happened months ago, scrolling down her wall / river without a filter tool is impractical.
Second: I tried to beat Facebook's search by rolling my own. I mentioned post categories earlier because FB itself uses them to split up member data in your downloadable account activity data. We downloaded hers. Browser searches through the five or six relevant raw html files did NOT show the keyword there. Various greps over the *entire* folder archive also failed. This happened even though older posts were available than the one Facebooks search tool had confirmed to exist.
The whole point is that giving you GUI search results of something you can't see in your full activity archive is proof that they selectively snatch data from your halds. We still know Facebook keeps all the data for whatever purposes the advertisers and research^W experiment teams need it. I recall that EU had laws forcing FB to make a physical CD available with the same archive zip data we can get. The discrepancies should be looked into, but FB is a free service anyway. I know shadow profiles get around some of our options, but the data we were looking for was user-initiated.
That's because you experienced it using bing. Now try it with native Facebook technology! It's great!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
One of the problems nowadays is that people put too much stock into fancy graph databases. They build apps on top of those because it's easier to persist data from a developer's point of view (no data model, no need for an ORM, no need to learn sql), but then things like search become almost impossible to do without complex and unreliable algorithms.
There's no magic. Searching requires a decent data model and a reliable indexing/partioning scheme. Young developers should stop jerking off with Big O notations and just apply common sense.
lucm, indeed.
the LIKE %abc% part makes it a bit difficult on the index, but overall, yeah, I totally agree with the general idea.
FB is not Google. They don't have to index the entire internet. All they have to do is let people search in the data they've entered in 3-4 different fields. How the fuck can they fail at this.
lucm, indeed.
That's not what Big Data means. Big Data is about finding patterns or trends in a large amount of possibly unstructured data. A simple search is a totally different scenario.
lucm, indeed.
Sorry dude but Myspace is not coming back. Let it go.
lucm, indeed.
Does Slashdot offer the ability to search out and read a user's posts going back to this site's inception?
In a particularly lame move, somebody put Bing search into Thunderbird. When searching your emails, you can also get irrelevant web search results via Bing. What the use case is for that I have no idea.
Facebook has search? Wait... is that for searching your posts for info, or is it like a Google search engine?