Today, Facebook announced Deep Text, an AI engine it’s building to understand the meaning and sentiment behind all of the text posted by users to Facebook. In a blog post, Facebook said that it was building the system to help it surface content that people may be interested in, and weed out spam.
This might sound like a minor improvement, but it actually has the potential—in theory—to transform the social network most of us use every day into something else we use daily: a powerful search engine.
“We want Deep Text to be used in categorizing content within Facebook to facilitate searching for it and also surfacing the right content to users,” Hussein Mehanna, an engineering director at Facebook’s machine learning team, told Quartz.
The universe of that search may not be the whole worldwide web that Google crawls, but it’s still massive. There are over a billion people who check Facebook every single day, and the network has trillions of status updates, event invitations, photo albums, and videos on its servers. Facebook is sitting on an ever-growing mountain of information that it can use more effectively to connect people with similar interests, sell more ads, and help people find things they’re looking for.
