An image posted from Mark Zuckerberg's computer shows an image of Facebook that could be introducing search. The company has hired former Google engineers and so everyone suspect that the world's No.1 social networking site could be gearing up for a battle with the search engine giant.

In an image on Zuckerberg's Facebook profile, an image of his MacBook Air shows a mysterious white bar at the top of the screen. Speculation is rife that the company could be launching its own search engine. Currently Facebook's search uses Bing.

"Facebook hasn't made search a priority, and it shows. The prominent white box at the top of each page is good at helping users find other members. It'll also spit back Facebook pages for brands and locations, recent status updates from friends, and general Web search powered by Microsoft's Bing search engine," Businessweek reports. Facebook's search doesn't cover all of the Internet, and Facebook only had 336 million search queries this February. "[M]agnitudes fewer than Google and its closest competitors," Businessweek adds, with the search giant receiving 17,628 million search queries in February 2012. Its closest competitor was Yahoo, at 2,911 million.

Rumors also suggest the company hired former Google engineers to work on search, a team led by ex-Google engineer Lars Rasmussen. The goal, sources, who wished to remain anonymous when speaking to Businessweek, reveal, is to improve the experience of finding content.

"The goal ... is to help users better sift through the volume of content that members create on the site, such as status updates, and the articles, videos and other information across the Web the people "like" using Facebook's ... thumbs-up button," the sources say.

The rumors don't suggest Facebook is going head-to-head with Google's search engine, instead improving Facebook's service and giving users reason to not switch to Google+.

"Google controls 67 percent of the search market in the U.S. and has sophisticated technology to track a trillion Web pages ... Facebook employs few, if any, traditional search engine engineers, who typically have deep expertise in fields such as information retrieval and natural language processing," says Businessweek. The advantage of that is Facebook allows user to rate content, rather than displaying everything simultaneously.

Rasmussen helped create Google Maps and built Google Wave, which was shut down. He joined Facebook in 2010. "[S]ocial is a significantly less explored area still than search, and it is sort of the frontier of technology in many ways. But that doesn't mean in any way that search is obsolete or even close to being obsolete," he said in an interview that year with the Sydney Morning Herald.

(reported by Jonathan Charles, edited by Surojit Chatterjee)