Marketing Pilgrim

Before we get in a tizzy, “social search” here only refers to looking at what your friends are doing on a social network. But yes, Facebook is currently testing real-time search results for searches on the social network:

Those of you in the test group will be able to find content from the people, organizations and public figures that matter to you as soon as they share it on Facebook. . . .

Those of you in the test group will see new layouts for search results that will continue to include people’s profiles, Facebook Pages, groups and applications, and some entirely new Search features. With the test, you will be able to search your News Feed for the most recent status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan.

So you can search for not just friends, pages and movie recommendations, but you can also search by topic (a la Twitter). The example in the blog post is the Iranian elections. In addition to pages and people in your personal network, you can also view status updates, links and notes from people who are sharing their profiles with everyone.

Read Write Web points out that this is an interesting move for FB after their last redesign, featuring a “live” news feed—a real-time, self-updating stream of updates from friends and pages. The redesign was so ill-received that Facebook backed off the real-time news stream.

So, RWW asks, is the place for real-time only in the search results?

What do you think? Is this something that will help increase FB’s time on site, or will few people use it (once it rolls out on a wide basis, anyway)?