Inside Facebook

In another small tweak to the site, Facebook has added support to quickly jump to individual Groups by using the auto-complete feature of Facebook search. Initially, auto-complete only displayed friends. Later, it was expanded to include applications and Facebook Pages, and now it supports Groups. Links to other core features, such as individual events or photo albums, are not supported.

Currently, auto-complete only supports recognition of characters in the beginning of a word. For example, to search for a group called “Facebook Developers,” the box would recognize the input “dev” and display the proper result. However, substrings of a word like “velop” or “acebook” do not return the desired group.

In the same way that the upcoming Firefox 3 supports a more intelligent location bar, perhaps Facebook could use some basic relevance algorithms, like Firefox’s “frecency,” to learn who or what you are searching for. The current method organizes results not by relevance but by alphabetical order.