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Facebook Drops Bing Search Results

Posted by timothy on from the capability-vs-provider dept.

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."

7 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Facebook search is horrible by brunes69 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Facebook search is horrible by Overzeetop · · Score: 2

      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. I copy off to Evernote when I can, though FB has taken the genius step of disabling copy (and paste, for some odd reason) in Android, which means running FB in a mobile browser if I really want to archive something.

      Of course, searching your own (or friends) history isn't the point of FB, but it seems like a pretty big miss if you want people to stay encapsulated in the system for marketing purposes.

      --
      Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
  2. Re:What took them so long? by fbobraga · · Score: 2

    it's not so simple: "Big data"

  3. Bing marketshare by mrflash818 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    Bing’s market share stayed at 17.9%, the same as it was in June. However, it is worth noting that Bing is up more than 2% from this time last year when they had 15.7% market share.

    http://www.searchenginejournal...

    --
    Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
  4. So totally awesome by JasonGoatcher · · Score: 2

    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.

  5. Facebook searches do NOT show everything by vlueboy · · Score: 2

    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.

  6. Speaking of searching old posts... by Catbeller · · Score: 2

    Does Slashdot offer the ability to search out and read a user's posts going back to this site's inception?