Facebook (Local) Search, Local Products, What's After Reviews, ChatGPT Erosion

Facebook Local Search: Take 6

More than 15 years ago, people-powered "Q&A" or "answer engines" attempted to bring real-time first-person knowledge to user questions in contrast to search. Facebook briefly launched one of these, called Facebook Questions. The unifying theme of all these "Q&A" sites was: tap into a human network (or UGC archive) to receive first-person recommendations. These systems held great promise but they never worked quite well enough. Facebook's new AI search is a kind of successor to these early answer engines. It's conversational AI on top of Meta UGC. And while it's not exclusively about local, it's definitely another run at local search, which will be a primary use case if it's used. Facebook has made several unsuccessful attempts to deliver local search and discovery experiences (e.g., here, here, here). And while Meta AI has limited usage (see below) this has the potential to be an effective local search tool. The unfortunately named "AI Mode" uses public posts from across Meta to deliver "real perspectives and experiences rather than a generic list of search results." The proposition is thus the same as these old Q&A sites. But search is no longer the same as this straw man implies. Google went all in on social in 2023 and has increasingly incorporated content from Reddit, YouTube and other UGC sources often to the detriment of quality and usability.