X1 Technologies Adds Robust Facebook Search Ability

X1 Technologies claims it’s been an active player in the search sector since late 2003, and the company’s latest software release, X1 Pro 7, adds the capability to search Facebook, Twitter, and Webmail to the existing ability to search corporate email and local files.
The new offering from X1, launching in beta Wednesday, will index the content of users, their friends, and friends of their friends, according to vice president of engineering Sumeet Sheokand, who added that X1 Pro 7 allows users to search their walls, their news feeds, and their status updates, as well as to archive their Facebook content.
According to Sheokand, X1 Pro 7 will also automatically fetch new comments on older posts and update its index, and users can search by keywords and filter out certain elements or users. Searches can also be saved, where they are available on the left-hand side of the page, along with the software’s other navigation tools.
Users can also play videos or view photos directly via X1 Pro 7, where they will appear in the pane on the right-hand side. And they can use the search capabilities to see what the Facebook social graph is currently talking about by searching for, as an example, Occupy Wall Street and examining the results.
We got an advance copy of the beta version and found the interface and access to the functionality of X1 Pro 7 to be extremely straightforward and easy to use. As with similar search products, the initial indexing can take quite a deal of time, but it’s a onetime task, and once it was completed, the response time of X1 Pro 7 was quick, with relevant results being delivered.
“Our goal was not to provide a better Facebook experience for its hundreds of millions of users,” X1 president Kevin Bray said. “We looked at what we do well, and we applied it. We want to eliminate as many clicks as possible.”
On the motivation for adding Facebook and Twitter to X1’s arsenal, Bray added, “It’s no secret that search hasn’t caught up to all of the other value that social media provides. We looked at social media and saw the same noise everyone else sees.”
X1 Pro 7 will be available free-of-charge during its beta period, after which the cost has yet to be determined. The current version of the X1 Professional Client costs $50, and Bray said the company will eventually offer the ability to search Facebook, Twitter, and Webmail as separate components.
Readers: What do you currently use to search Facebook?