FACEBOOK: Another new redesign could focus on search

Over the past few months we’ve all become accustomed to the way the new Facebook timeline works, after agonising over a cover photo and deleting all those photos of our exes of course. So it makes perfect sense that the social network is set to confuse its users again with a new redesign, but this time it isn’t to our profiles or the way we chat to one another, but the way we search for things.

The proposed change (you can see it in the screenshot from Inside Facebook above) that’s currently being tested admittedly hardly looks that different, but it shifts the search bar over to the left and lumps together your notifications on the right.

Many have been suggesting that this move is to focus users on Facebook’s search capabilities, as well as the way it allows us all to chat, like and stalk. It would certainly make sense given the addition of the words “search for people, places and things” to the search bar earlier in the year and the fact you now get web results served up by Bing when you do enter any search terms.

However, it’s also been suggested that the focus isn’t on the search bar at all, but actually forces us to look to the right hand side straight away (to see our notifications) where we’re much more likely to pay attention to the ads and gifts and other crap down that side of the screen.

Either way the changes aren’t huge, but it will be interesting to see what Facebook chooses to focus on in the future, as privacy concerns, security changes and a focus on ads and gifts is clearly putting off a number of users at present.

[Via Inside Facebook]