• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 8, 2013

Faster broadband speeds contribute to the success of search marketing, but a better social search engine should improve the ability to find information and target marketing on Facebook. Even more, the question remains whether Bing's support of Web search for the social site will lead to a crossover of social-Web search and ad targeting in the future.

Facebook said on Monday it will expand Graph Search services from its limited beta trial to all site members in the United States. I don't have the answer to how Facebook Graph Search will make the crossover into Web search for ad targeting, but I'm sure the folks at Bing do. 

Improvements range from speed to accuracy, as well as auto-fill and suggestions. The tool will offer complex filtering that allows users to search for friends and related items based on combinations of interests, location, and more. Algorithms now better identify what people want. The tool searches for people, photos, places and things that friends like, and will work on making posts, status updates and comments searchable.

A new feature that allows the platform to better understand queries offers more ways to ask questions. And with the increase in ability to better define search results, Facebook users will see a notice on their home page with a reminder about how to control what they share and with whom. The company continues to highlight new privacy tools to help people manage what they share on Facebook, but users need to take responsibility to understand those rules and put them to use.

Facebook published three tips about search privacy in an effort to teach user how to protect their content.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with SocialCode CEO and founder Laura O'Shaughnessy. We speculated on a real-time ad-targeting model for Facebook based on hashtags, and what it would take to integrate targeting into Graph Search.

Graph Search, launched in beta last January, grew up with mixed reviews. Augmented by Microsoft's search engine Bing, Facebook's tool offers a lot of potential, but changes seem to move at a snail's pace compared with Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. Since Graph Search isn't Web search, it interacts with Bing when there is not enough information in a social circle to get useful information. I've been wondering whether Bing will augment ad targeting for Facebook users, similar to the way Web search supports search on the site.