Addressing a standing-room-only audience at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicated that the social networking company would probably intensify its competition with Internet search giant Google, by giving its users more ways to search on its website.

With his presence at the conference marking his first interview ever since the rocky initial public offering (IPO) of Facebook in May, Zuckerberg - acknowledging that the performance of the Facebook stock has clearly been "disappointing" - said that the somewhat slipshod attitude which the social network has had towards search is eventually set for a change.

Revealing that approximately 1 billion search requests per day are processed by Facebook, even despite the fact that the company is "basically are not even trying," Zuckerberg said that "one obvious, interesting thing" which his company will apparently do in the future is to come up with a notably more robust search engine.

Facebook's direction towards that end will be particularly noteworthy in the wake of the fact that Google is already going all out to maintain the dominating position of its popular search engine with its 2011-launched own social network, Google+, which was rolled out with the aim of gaining more insights about the preferences of its users.

Meanwhile, noting that Facebook has kept growing even in spite of strong opposition to the changes it made to its website's design and privacy policies in the past, Zuckerberg said: "Facebook has not been an uncontroversial company."