Facebook expanding its instant search results

New instant feature taps into your social network of friends for more relevant results

Facebook, announced this week it would be rolling out a new feature to its instant search results.  The feature taps into a users network of friends to attempt deliver more relevant search results.  

The social networking giant showed off an example on its blog using the search "MGM."  Facebook engineer, Wayne explained,

"if you start typing in "MGM" to find the Facebook Page for the band MGMT, you may see it as the first result in the drop-down menu because you or one of your friends is a fan of MGMT on Facebook. You can simply hit enter on that result and you will be taken directly to the MGMT Page.  If you are searching for something else, like the MGM Grand Las Vegas hotel or the movie studio MGM, you can select one of those instead from the drop-down menu."

This is a pretty loaded update to Facebook's instant search results.  If you ever used Facebook search before, you've probably noticed it's been pretty focused displaying results of the people in your network.  

The update hasn't made its way to my account yet so when I start typing a letter into the Facebook search box, the instant results are pretty limited to my list of friends.  For example, say I want to search for a band like Nine Inch Nails, if I start typing in "NIN" into my search bar, all I get back instantly is "Nina,"  one of my Facebook friends with the same first letters as the band.  

Facebook continues climb the ladder of being a top destination on the Web.  Earlier this week, analytics firm Hitwise found the social networking site surpassed search giant, Google as the top online destination for the week ending March 13.  With improved search features like this, Facebook could perhaps get its users to conduct searches on its site instead of on Google - especially for searches related to music, film, travel, events or any other sorts of media related queries, the things people tend to talk about among each other.