Mark Zuckerberg wants the Facebook universe to be as searchable as the Web–with a tool as powerful as Google. Last month he called Facebook’s travels into search a “multi-year voyage,” but left little doubt it was a journey he was eager to go on. One piece of functionality Facebook users really want is an excellent search tool that allows better access to previous posts. (Facebook content tends to get buried pretty fast and disinterring it is not just hard but sometimes impossible.) Bloomberg reports that Facebook has recently taken its first steps on this journey, “testing a feature for its mobile application that lets people search through old posts from friends by keyword, a move that makes it easier to resurface content.”
What would it ultimately mean if Facebook’s search efforts are effective–and if Facebook allowed universal use of a post search tool that really worked? It’s dizzying, really. As Zuckerberg said early this year on an earnings call: “There are more than a trillion status updates and unstructured text posts and photos and pieces of content that people have shared over the past 10 years.” Then the Facebook CEO put that figure into context: “a trillion pieces of content is more than the index in any web search engine.” You know what “any web search engine” spells? That’s a funny way of spelling Google.
