Did you hear that long circulating rumors about a Facebook search feature were finally confirmed this week? Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, participated in a press conference to introduce Facebook’s “Graph Search.” This new search feature will not be a directly competing search engine against Google, Yahoo, and Bing. At least for now. The new search product is aimed at serving up results on Facebook, via Facebook data. Search Engine Watch commented that the product “is about filtering and sorting through the 240 billion photos and nearly 1 trillion connections of the entire Facebook community.
It will be interesting to watch the evolution of this feature. Those that seem to potentially gain the most at this early stage, are local businesses. The more efficiently that a local business has their Facebook profile set up (business hours added, pricing info, address, etc.) can show up in results. The more social that a business is and how aggressive they are at acquiring interaction and check-in’s from Facebook users could greatly influence how they show up in the new Facebook Graph Search.