• VentureBeat , Monday, November 12, 2007 12:32 PM

Facebook has a new search bar allowing people to search for advertising pages. VentureBeat says the development marks "a steady creep in search options," suggesting Facebook aims to challenge Google's sacred territory.

For now, no. Facebook search only includes tabs for searching people, groups, events, applications, and anything else you can find only within its network. The social network is not indexing the Web. Where would it get the search results? Microsoft.

Such a partnership could lead to a high quality search engine. Social networks, with all that rich user data, are one area of the Web that Google's crawlers can't reach. If Microsoft had access to that data, its search engine could become instantly more effective for the 45 million Web users on Facebook's network. Imagine search results based on what users clicked on rather than how many times a given page was linked to? Millions of users have already signed off on applications that leverage their personal data.

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