Today Facebook announced that they plan to release its own search engine to compete with Google. They will make an official announcement later tonight where they intend, supposedly, to present their current progress. It is still unsure what their new release will be. Rumors range from search engines to ip-phone service, to its own mobile phones.

Facebook sent this teaser invite to US journalists:



Facebook has stated that they will launch a big new 'search feature' on the site in the very near future which will "shake everything up".

If Facebook does indeed launch its own search engine, many users may do all their searching there since many spend so much time on Facebook throughout their day. If it turns out that this is what Facebook has planned then Google will need to work hard to maintain their user base. The combination of social networking and searching is something that Google itself has already been attempting with their Google+ network, so it's quite feasible that Facebook would try it as well.

It's expected that the new feature will be available within just a few hours of its annoucement tonight.

Whatever their announcement will be, it's quite probable that users will be very excited. Nobody knows yet which, if any, of the rumors are true, so we'll all just have to wait until tonight.

Sources:

DailyMail