TWTR Twitter Inc

Facebook Inc. is taking another crack at search.

The company said Thursday it has indexed more than two trillion posts from the social network, touting it as a way for users to track discussion of news events in real time.

"A large percentage of people who come to Facebook, find out about what's happening in the world through their news feed," Tom Stocky, vice president of search at Facebook, said in an interview. "This is an extension of that."

By positioning itself as a source for news, Facebook is pitting itself against messaging service Twitter Inc., which recently added a curated news service called Moments.

In late June, some users were prompted to search for news about ballerina Misty Copeland after she was named the first black principal ballerina in the American Ballet Theatre. These and other tests conducted by Facebook showed users had a big appetite for "things that are trending right now," Mr. Stocky said.

Facebook is also ratcheting up its rivalry with search giant Google, now a unit of Alphabet Inc., by creating a search engine that falls outside Google's scope. More than 1.5 billion search requests are made every day on Facebook, the company said Thursday. Google last updated its search figures in 2012, when it was averaging about 3.3 billion searches a day.

Facebook said users would be able to search through posts from friends as well as any post marked "public," which could raise concerns about privacy. Managing that capability will be complicated because users can change the privacy settings of their posts at any time, former employees and search experts have said. Posts are also updated "billions of times" whenever users comment or like them, Mr. Stocky said.

Traditional search engines such as Google don't face this particular issue. Facebook engineers had to create a system, called "Live Updates," that combs the social network and tracks changes to posts. "All of these things have to be reflected in the search results within seconds or minutes," Mr. Stocky said.

Facebook's previous attempt at search, the Graph Search feature launched in 2013, disappointed in part because of technical complexity. Even so, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has maintained that beefing up search is important to the company's long-term strategy.

Facebook's collection of public posts "is bigger than any web search corpus that is out there," he told analysts in July. "We're going to start off focusing on stuff that's unique to Facebook, that you couldn't really answer those questions elsewhere."

A well-honed search function would keep users on Facebook longer, allowing the social network to collect more data about its users, analysts say. Many Facebook users already use posts on the social network for help choosing a restaurant or a baby sitter, including Mr. Stocky who took to Facebook recently for stroller recommendations for his newborn child. Studies show that many consumers prefer recommendations from friends over anonymous reviews.

But for billions of people, Google is synonymous with search. That is a mentality Facebook will have to change if it hopes to take some of that activity away from Google, said Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst for Adobe Digital Index.

The search capability was earlier reported by tech website the Verge.

Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 22, 2015 21:05 ET (01:05 GMT)

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