Facebook shares have risen by a record amount following Mark Zuckerberg's first interview after the company's controversial flotation.
Shares in the social networking site have lost around 50% of their value since May's public offering, but closed up 7.7% on Wednesday, at $20.93 (£13).
This marks the largest one-day gain since Facebook began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
In the hotly anticipated interview on Tuesday, Mr Zuckerberg admitted the performance of his company's shares had "obviously been disappointing".
But he insisted the business had survived troubles before - and confirmed speculation that it plans to enter one of technology's most lucrative markets: internet search.
The comments by the 28-year-old chief executive appeared to calm investors concerned about Facebook's ability to increase revenue and make money from its growing mobile audience.
When the company went public, 421 million shares were issued at $38 (£24.20) each, rising as high as $45 (£28.66) each after trading began.
But the stock closed on its first day barely above its initial public offering price of $38 and has been below that level since.
At the San Francisco Disrupt conference, Mr Zuckerberg said that internet search - long dominated by Google - offers a "big opportunity" that Facebook is uniquely positioned to take advantage of.
Around one billion searches are made on Facebook each day, he said, which represent an opportunity to develop a fuller search feature.
But although the majority are from users looking for friends on the site, a meaningful portion are for businesses, brands and apps.
"Facebook is really uniquely positioned to answer a lot of the questions that people have," Mr Zuckerberg said.
"These are queries that you could potentially do with Facebook if we built out the system that you just couldn't do anywhere else, and at some point we'll do it."
Mr Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004 while at Harvard University, controls more than half of the voting stock in the company.
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