Facebook Begins Testing Sponsored Results, Its First Search Typeahead Ads

techcrunch.com

8 points·irunbackwards··8 comments

I have to admit my enthusiasm is near nil. It sounds like not only the trite reinforcement of the "user as marketable commodity audience" but it just smacks of mild desperation to monetize anything it can to support its now publicly tradable status.

Maybe that is horribly cynical, but for some reason it leaves a very sour taste.

I think monetizing their search in this method is a bad idea.

Google advertising uses second price auctions and rewards sponsors for having high click through rates and relevant word matching. In short, the ads are helping people find what they're looking for anyway.

These ads in the facebook search are just annoying and get in the way of what the users are trying to do - hurting the user experience.

Until I read this article, I didn't even know Facebook _had_ a search. Why would I possible search for anything on Facebook? I know who my friends are, and for everything else, there's Google.

I use search to find friends that I'm not Facebook friends are, and to quickly jump to someone's page.

From what I've recently learned, isn't this what killed Digg?

No the Facebook equivalent is the eventually pollution of the newsfeed. Although you can say that that is already happening.

No. What killed Digg was v4: 1) Removing the downvote option, 2) The discovery of automated accounts which would upvote sponsored articles, and 3) Reasonable alternatives, i.e. Reddit, etc. After all, Digg is just a social bookmarking site.

Facebook don't make functionality to please the users anymore, only inverstors. And that will cost them a lot of users.

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