Your Technology News & Reviews Partner
Facebook is set to bolster the search functionality on its site with a hope that users will ditch Google in favour of the social network.
This is according to unnamed sources, which cite that Facebook has a number of people working on the new search functionality – one of which is an ex Google employee.
Facebook is well known for keeping the amount of people working on its new features to a bare minimum. When it came to revamping its photo service, there were only a handful of people working on the project – and it is this type of working atmosphere which Facebook likes to feedback to other developers with its Facebook Garage events.
So it is interesting that there's said to be 24 people working on the new rumoured search functionality, and these are lead by former Google employee Lars Rasmussen.
This is all according to Business Week, which reckons Facebook wants to utilise its mountains of information with better search controls.
Although it is unlikely Facebook will reach the heady heights of Google's search traffic, Facebook has slowly but surely started feeding the web Inception-like into its network.
There are myriad apps out there that allow you to read content from papers within the site and this goes to listening to music as well.
The dream for Facebook would be to free its social data with better search. This is something Google is trying at the moment with integrating its search with Google+. This is proving difficult, though, because Google+ isn't embedded into people's lives as much as Facebook is at the moment.
The problem Facebook has, however, is the privacy controls on users' accounts – which means that a revamped search function would only really be able to show results which a member of the social network has set to public.
A Google-like search on Facebook would tap into the still young social search market. At the moment, the global search market is worth billions and Facebook will definitely want to tap into this revenue stream.
If Business Week is correct and Facebook is looking to make everyone change their homepage from Google to the social network, then this could well be something that shakes up a search market that's currently a one-horse race.
 |  |
Spotify has revealed that it has dropped the song-play limit for free users in Europe, apart from those who use the service in the UK and France.
The song limit functionality was introduced back in April 2011 and was part of a number of limitations added to the free version of the service.
Spotify has confirmed to TechRadar that this has now been dropped but the limits are still firmly in place for the UK and France.
"The five play-per-song limit on Spotify Free has been removed across Europe, apart from the UK and France," explained a Spotify spokesperson to TechRadar.
"We're taking the fight to piracy and seeing millions of people choose to pay for music again. We did this by offering people the best music service on the planet and an unrivalled free music tier is fundamental to that.
"We've been working with record labels to remove the five-plays-per-song limit introduced last year and this news is a result of that work."
There's no word as to when the UK will see this song limit dropped, but it's good news that the limit is toppling in some areas, and those areas are: Sweden, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands and Spain.
| |
