Facebook is ditching general web search.

Microsoft said almost the same thing to VentureBeat: “Facebook recently changed its search experience to focus on helping people tap into information that’s been shared with them on Facebook versus a broader set of web results. We continue to partner with Facebook in many different areas.”

Search is an incredibly difficult space to delve into, and Facebook’s search products will face their own unique challenges in that the closed network, with over 1 billion active users, is home to more than a trillion posts. Zuck said on an analyst conference call in July that his search engineers often remind him that Facebook represents the biggest Web search corpus out there.

Removing open Web results from Facebook is a big deal.

The closed Web is now bigger than the open Web.

Facebook now wants to use AI to understand the trillion post hive mind:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/28/mining-the-hive-mind/