Facebook is taking advantage of it’s user base of 500 million people by launching into search with a trial of a new feature called Questions.
The service, which has been rolled out to a select number of testers goes head to head with other similar services such as Yahoo! Answers, Twitter and the search engine Ask.com which was designed and built around the concept.
The BBC reported that Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the blog Search Engine Land said…
“The core of search is a question, gor thousands of years we asked questions of people that we trusted. Then around 15 years ago we underwent an incredible revolution with the arrival of search engines.”
Mr Sullivan said Questions was a return to this age of more personalised search. “You can now put questions out there in a way we used to do before everyone was online,” he said.
The feature would allow people to click an “Ask Question” button and would allow you to pose the question to just your friends, networks or the wider internet. “The questions you ask will be shown to people who have expressed interest in the particular topics you tag, as well as to your friends and friends of friends.”
Earlier in the year Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook said that his vision of the future of the web was one where your friends guide you online, this would be a step towards that.
Any search service by Facebook would not step on the toes of the giants Bing, Yahoo! and Google by any means, but it’s an extra feature to help keep the sites’ users base happy. Without those users the company would very quickly go bust as was seen with Friends Reunited who were sold to UK television company ITV and then plummeted in value because the site didn’t keep up with the needs of its users.
