Search Pages in Facebook: Useless, or good first step?

Facebook recently added the ability for users to search Pages as well as the usual people, groups, and applications. I have always thought that Facebook’s search feature is relatively useless and ineffective, despite the fact that it is largely the only way to find anything.

VentureBeat seems to think this could be the first step towards really taking on Google at its own game:

It raises a new question about Facebook’s ambitions, as it finds itself the David against the Google Goliath. Will it pull out the ultimate slingshot: a full-fledged search engine for the web, not just the Facebook site?

Good Lord I hope not. The Facebook search experience so far is abysmal, and I don’t have much faith in their ability to pull together anything remotely competitive with Google.

Clickety Clack certainly thinks that Page search is a bad move:

Wow, this sounds so useless– a feature that caters to advertisers instead of users. As greedy as I am, one of the things Google taught me was to be cautious about changing focus to serve advertisers instead of the core users.

I’m not sure I agree there. Searching Pages isn’t useless - it’s part of the core idea behind pages: that they can be discovered and aligned with.

What I’d really like to see is Facebook spend time improving it’s internal search experience, which is I think largely a UI issue. Then maybe, maybe we can talk about Facebook searching the web.

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