The giant in the Social Networking business has come up with yet another invention for which it has won relevant patent rights. Facebook has quite often patented most of its innovations and its recently patented innovation was that of The News Feed. The reason for such an initiation by Facebook to follow a systematic patenting process is to secure itself from being sued by rivals as it currently faces patent-related allegations from Microsoft.
This new patent application was apparently filed six years ago whilst it was being discovered by Chris Lunt, Nicholas Galbreath and Jeff Winner. Better late than never for Facebook, this new patent is a product based majorly on interests and behavioural patterns of a user’s friends and friends of friends online.
The precise definition of this patent states and I quote ‘”Ranking search results based on the frequency of clicks on the search results by members of a social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation”. This essentially means that whenever a search item is entered onto the search engine by a user, the search results that he/ she is bound to retrieve may be influenced by the online behaviour of the user’s friends. The search results that qualify with maximum frequency of clicks by members of the social network (friends and friends of friends) would pop-up on the user’s search engine results list. Some behavioural factors of the user’s friends that could have an impact on the search results are the content ‘liked’, the groups that they belong to, applications often used, etc.
The working of this patent here also explains that if the search query does not find any matching results from the third party database (which largely involves the social network) the server is programmed to throw up results in the old fashioned way. It can surely be acknowledged that this novelty is aimed at the betterment of the social search engine feature of the site. Moreover, Facebook definitely needs to be appreciated for discovering the new social search feature and with this surpassing its recent redesign of its search engine.
Facebook can hope to enhance its business with the latest social search engine feature. This newly patented feature is evidently a highlight and an extension of the sidebar ads and recommendations that are based on the likes and preferences of the user’s friends, hence gratifying Facebook’s purpose of enabling users to discover a larger social network and benefit either professionally or personally. Very few speculations state that in dire cases wherein if this feature fails to impress users on a social platform, Facebook’s Plan B could be to outsource the search feature to generic search engines like Bing. Though, it would be a challenge to achieve social networking based ranking of search results on generic search engines since there is not the existence of a large social network base.
