[purplelobster]

I doubt I'd use it for any of those reasons, but I guess it doesn't hurt to have the search there. Just like outfitting your blog with a search function, this improves the usability of the site a bit, but I'd hardly think it would be a very big profit maker for Facebook. On the other hand, if it helped you reach out to people you don't know for various reasons, maybe to find a language studying partner, people to play sports with etc, that would be more useful. It would also be perfect for businesses when they want to find and target messages to a certain audience. The only problem is, I doubt very many people would like to share their information with anyone outside of their friends, I sure don't.