• Paid Content, Tuesday, August 11, 2009 10:45 AM

After a couple months of internal testing, Facebook has started to roll out a search service geared to give it an edge in the real-time search market.

The new service -- which allows users to find status updates, photos, links, and videos posted by their friends and the broader community -- will compete directly with Twitter's search engine, which, until now, has served as the best judge of what Web users are "thinking" at any given moment in time.

It's heartening to see that, despite its market dominance, Facebook is still actively involved in improving it service. Maybe its founder Mark Zuckerberg read a recent online poll of over 1 million respondents, which found that 94% of Facebook users panned its most recent redesign.

Or, perhaps, he caught the recent diatribe on Slate.com, which described Facebook as "one of the world's most-annoying, least-intuitive Web sites."

In the piece, Slate actually suggested that, to make it easier to find one's stuff on Facebook, the site should add a link to the home page called "Your Stuff," which would take you to a page that lists your groups, your photos, and all your other things on the same page rather than divided in multiple tabs.

Admirers of Twitter's clean and intuitive interface ourselves, we like to believe Facebook will fail to gain traction in any area where the two rivals overlap. Unfortunately, given Facebook's massive user-base, that seems less than likely.

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