Facebook as a Search Engine

We have been saying it for the last year, that more and more people use Facebook to search for things other than just friends, crushes and ex-boyfriends…like products and services…and a while ago Facebook made this type of searching much easier. When you search with keywords on Facebook you get results in different categories, like people, pages, applications and web.

That last one is key: now you can actually browse the entire internet via Facebook. A recent development, Facebook features their search results from Microsoft’s Bing search engine:

And before you even click enter, when typing keywords into the search field at the top of any Facebook page, the top relevant results pop up, encouraging you to visit these most popular pages or profiles.

For example, when I type “shoes” into the search field I get these suggestions:

The most relevant page to my search term, and the page with the most fans, appears first. If I type in a brand name like Levi’s, I not only get the Levi’s official page, but other small fan pages, as well as a personal profile of a person with “levis” in her name. She and I have 4 mutual friends, so Facebook thinks I might either be looking for her, or could possibly be interested in connecting with her.

This drop-down menu of search results is new, and I am sure many people did not notice its appearance.

I wonder, does this have any SEO implications that might affect page developers? Will it change the way you use Facebook?