Improving Facebook

            One night when I first set up my facebook account I had trouble sleeping because I was thinking about a way to incorporate two of the most influential online sites today, Facebook and Google.  Since, these are arguably the two most visited sites and spend the most amount of time on, so I thought that they should somehow combine to give the users a better experience.  I then was trying to decide if it would be best to have mainly the Google site with Facebook aspects or should Facebook integrate some of the Google technology.  I settled that it would be best and easiest for the social network to have search engine capabilities.

            I first stumbled upon this idea when I was thinking how could Facebook be improved.  This social network has become such a phenomenon, but it is not perfect.  I thought by adding some Google search abilities it could be vastly improved.  Facebook already had a limited search option.  One used to be only able to search for other people or groups on Facebook, but there really was no real search engine within the site.  At one point if somebody wanted to search for a particular word or phrase within someone’s post or comments there was no way for them to do that.  Now in Facebook someone can search for a phrase, it is only limited to posts by friends and groups that the user likes. 

I was hoping that Facebook could expand on this search engine by broadening its search results.  For example, instead of being only limited to posts by users and liked groups, they should adopt more of a Google search engine.  The search engine should be able to look throughout the entirety of the site.  Of course, all the user pages set to private could not be viewed by non-friended users, but besides those secured pages all of Facebook should be searchable.  Then by incorporating the Google search engine which, as I understand it, prioritizes pages according to visits, relevancy, and similar criteria.  So when searching in this social network the obvious first things to pop up should be the information of friends and liked pages.  Then probably most pages visited or something of that nature. I think that it is great that Facebook is improving their site every day, but there is always room for improvement and hopefully that add a feature similar to this soon.

            Also, I thought that the social network could also add an element from Yahoo as well. I visit the Yahoo website everyday in order to look at the recent global stories.  I was thinking that Facebook could add a similar aspect on the site.  In addition to the News Feed and Most Recent tabs, they could install an article feed that would generate the most recent and relevant news from around the world.  Of course as a user starts use this feature they are able to pick and choose which type of article pop-up most on their page. Also the site on its own could start to discern the type of articles the user reads.  These are just small improvements that the already impressive site could hopefully user.