Grow the Revenue Facebook Earns From In-App Search Without Hurting Search Quality
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Meta working on search in the Facebook app: the search bar people use to find friends, Pages, groups, posts, videos and Marketplace listings. How would you improve the way Facebook search makes money? Decide where to focus, propose specific improvements, and explain how you would measure whether they work.
```hint Start from search intent
Facebook searches are not all alike: some look for a person, others for a business, a product or a topic. Ask which kinds of search carry commercial intent, and where a paid result would help the searcher rather than get in the way.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Does monetization mean advertising revenue only, or also commerce-related revenue and paid tools for businesses, for example on Marketplace?
- Which surfaces count as search here: the main search bar only, or also search inside Marketplace, groups and Pages?
- Are there limits we must respect, such as a cap on sponsored results per results page or a minimum level of search satisfaction?
- Should the plan target a particular platform or market, or Facebook search worldwide?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- How search on Facebook differs from web search (largely social and navigational) and what that implies about where revenue can come from.
- Segmentation of searches or searchers by intent, with a reasoned choice of which commercial segment to start with.
- Specific improvements tied to that segment's pain points for searchers and for businesses, prioritized by revenue, user value and effort.
- A primary success metric plus guardrails for search quality, user trust and advertiser return.
- Risks such as ad blindness, privacy limits and ad budgets simply moving over from other placements.
### Follow-up Questions
- An experiment shows sponsored results raise revenue per search, but more searchers re-type their query or leave without clicking anything. Do you ship it?
- How would you show that search revenue is new money rather than ad budget moved from Feed or Reels?
- How would your plan differ for searches inside Marketplace compared with the main search bar?
Overview: A product sense question asking how Facebook could earn more revenue from its in-app search while keeping search useful. It tests intent-based segmentation of searches, monetization ideas for businesses and shoppers, prioritization, and success metrics with search-quality and incrementality guardrails.