Facebook is making its move into the highly competitive e-commerce space after it acquired shopping search engine ‘TheFind’, reports the Financial Express.

Both, the social networking giant Facebook and the shopping search engine TheFind cast the acquisition as a way to lift the digital advertising business of Facebook, which made $12.6 billion in annual ad sales last year.

“Together, we believe we can make the Facebook ads experience even more relevant and better for consumers,” Facebook said in a statement about the deal. TheFind echoed those comments, saying its technology would be integrated into Facebook “to make the ads you see on Facebook every day better and more relevant to you.”

In its official post, TheFind said many of its employees would be joining Facebook and work on improving the relevance of the social network’s advertising. TheFind added that its search engine will go offline “in the next few weeks.”

Here is the full post:

We are joining Facebook!

For the last nine years, we've worked hard to bring you a shopping experience that's easy, efficient and fun - searching all the stores on the web to find just the right products you're looking to buy.

We are now starting our next chapter by combining forces with Facebook to do even more for consumers. Facebook's resources and platform give us the opportunity to scale our expertise in product sourcing to the over 1 billion people that use the platform.

Key members of our team are joining the company and will be working hard to integrate our technology to make the ads you see on Facebook every day better and more relevant to you.

Unfortunately, this means we will be taking our search engine offline in the next few weeks.

Thank you for your loyalty and for making this a fun journey for all of us!

- TheFind Team

Since July last year, Facebook has been testing a “buy” button that lets users purchase goods directly. Now, with TheFind, it would be able to add additional shopping tools to its service.

TheFind was co-founded in 2006 by CEO Siva Kumar and CTO Shashikant Khandelwal, both native Indians. The company previously raised $26 million in three investment rounds, but had not received an influx of cash since 2007.

In other news, Facebook is providing the public with more information about what material is banned on the social network. 

The company has revamped its community standards to include a separate section on "dangerous organisations" and give more details about what types of nudity it allows to be posted. The US firm said it hoped the new guidelines would provide "clarity". The company claims that about 1.4 billion people use its service at least once a month

Monika Bicket, Facebook's global head of content policy, told the BBC that the rewrite was intended to address confusion about why some takedown requests were rejected.

Facebook's guidelines urge members to report posts that they believe violate its rules. “We [would] send them a message saying we're not removing it because it doesn't violate our standards, and they would write in and say I'm confused about this, so we would certainly hear that kind of feedback," Bicket told the BBC.

"And people had questions about what we meant when we said we don't allow bullying, or exactly what our policy was on terrorism.

"[For example] we now make clear that not only do we not allow terrorist organisations or their members within the Facebook community, but we also don't permit praise or support for terror groups or their acts or their leaders, which wasn't something that was detailed before."

The new version of the guidelines runs to nearly 2,500 words, nearly three times as long as before.