The Web has been buzzing with speculation as to who might acquire Twitter and realize the dream of a real-time search engine from a top search company. Now Facebook is gearing up to eat Twitter’s lunch yet again by revamping its search to include recent posts.

The rivalry between Facebook and Twitter as a social networking platform has been a heated arms race to this point. Facebook followed Twitter by changing its feed to focus on people and conversations, even adopting Twitter’s look in it stream.

Next Facebook let users open their profiles and content up to the world. The open nature of Twitter is what drove relationship-building and allowed the content to be used for its real-time search engine.

Facebook’s real-time search engine has a major advantage over Twitter in terms of community. By allowing you to search messages from friends as well as Facebook’s massive network, the company should be able to provide results that are relevant to users on a personal level.

However Facebook’s privacy settings and the sheer complexity of applying a search against the social graph are no small challenges. For Facebook’s search to become truly personal, it would have to serve up different results for each user individually.

In the first release of Facebook’s real-time search feature, posts from your friends will come before posts by the community at large as you can see below. This lessens the burden of providing completely different results for each person, but is the first step in that direction.

This is also Facebook’s first foray into truly indexing the loads of content uploaded by users on a daily basis. Facebook’s people search feature has always been fairly good, but just doesn’t require the indexing and content analysis necessary for the new real-time search.

Facebook’s new search features will be rolled out in stages as is the company’s custom. It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s real-time search evolves and how that effects its positioning in the social networking space as well as in terms of the top players in search.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 10:16 am under Internet, Social Media, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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