Facebook's study of news revealed its plans to be the next top search engine

Facebook posted a study on what Americans see in the News Feed from "ideologically diverse" sources. The company created a bot to categorize news based on headlines and the first few words of an article. However, the bot revealed more about Facebook's future plans to expand its search capabilities than it did about user echo chambers.

Why the study is so easily criticized: The sample set doesn't reflect the average American. Facebook found that only about a quarter of politically affiliated American users are exposed to ideologically diverse news. Only 9 percent of US-based Facebook users post a political affiliation. A study about a self-identifying minority is a study about silos. If they show little to no correlative relationship to their sources of news, the silos would be debunked. But the study shows the opposite. What the bot is really telling us: Facebook is building a search engine to rival Google. The bot is a preview of how that search will rank stories. John Constine and Kyle Russell at TechCrunch shared screenshots of a newly discovered way to use Facebook search. The "Add a Link" function lets you post search results to your page that originally come from outside of Facebook. And how do you see webpage search results inside Facebook of webpages that live outside of Facebook unless you first index those pages? And how do you target those search results based on user preference? You use web crawling bots that read quickly and correlate user data and content. Facebook has already crawled 1 trillion link posts inside Facebook. Now it just has to crawl everything else on the World Wide Web. What will it look like? Something like what Google+ was supposed to be, but if the "+" part came first.