• BNET, Wednesday, March 16, 2011 12:48 PM

CBS News' Bnet.com considers a patent granted last month to Facebook, which describes an approach to search that combines any type of search engine results with the popularity of each result among members of a user's social network. "For some time, Facebook has been interested in semantic search -- using its social graph and immense amount of information about its users to deliver search results," Bnet writes.

In essence, Facebook is considering combining search results for a user with how others connected to the user in a social network responded to the search results. "If most people clicked on a handful of results, the user could see those links with some visual indication of their relative popularity." Adds Bnet: "The implications are actually quite broad and could affect conventional search; specialty interest search topics like travel; publishing; and e-commerce; just to name a few."

Read the whole story at BNET »