Facebook appears to have quietly rolled out the beefed-up search offering some time over the past few days; it was first spotted by All Facebook.
From the looks of it, Facebook is ranking results based on how users engage with content via its social plugins. It's unclear how Facebook is defining its formula -- the formula seems to account for shares and Likes from a member's friends as well as shares and Likes from everyone else to determine an item's placement.
Just recently, Facebook was awarded a search patent for "ranking search results based on the frequency of clicks on the search results by members of a social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation.”
The company has yet to officially announce the new search functionality or explain how it works. We've reached out to Facebook for more information and will update this post when we know more.
For the time being, consider this yet another small step in Facebook's designs to capture search share and harness the abundance of data available around their social plugins.
Update: Facebook responded to our inquiry explaining, "We launched the ability to see articles shared by your direct friends in the search typeahead. For instance, if your friend is on a news site and clicks “Like” under one of the articles (which will then go into News Feed), when you go to search for that article on Facebook, it will surface in the dropdown."
