Tecnologia

On Feb. 1, a few hours after Facebook declared its intention to raise $5 billion in what will likely be the largest initial public offering in tech history, Mark Zuckerberg gave close followers ofhis company a potential clue to its future. On his Facebook profile, he uploaded a photograph of his desk and a large sign that read in big red letters, “Stay focused & keep shipping.” Yet
it was theadjacent MacBook laptop in the image that drew the most attention. Visible on the computer’s screen was a blurry image of a Facebook page and, at the top, what seemed to be an unusually elongatedwhite box. Web pundits speculated the image showed a prototype of a new Facebook search engine.
To date, Facebook hasn’t made search a priority, and it shows. The prominent white box at the top of eachpage is good at helping users find other members. It’ll also spit
back Facebook pages for brands and locations, recent status updates from friends, and general Web search results powered byMicrosoft’s (MSFT) Bing search engine. It’s a crude tool, however. Type in “Sonoma winery,” for example, and you get a disorganized assortment of wineries, people who work at wineries, unrelated banner ads, and apage for a wine-tasting iPhone app. In February, Facebook fielded 336 million search queries, according to ComScore—magnitudes fewer than Google (GOOG) and its closest competitors.
Searching thesocial network could get a lot better in the near future. About two dozen Facebook engineers, led by a former Google engineer named Lars Rasmussen,
are working on an improved search engine, say twopeople familiar with the project who did not want to be named because the company is in a quiet period ahead of its IPO. The goal, they say, is to help users better sift through the volume of content thatmembers create on the site, such as status updates, and the articles, videos, and other information across the Web that people “like” using Facebook’s omnipresent thumbs-up button.
The $15...