Facebook’s Graph Search Opens Up Social Network
Move over, Google: Facebook’s “Graph Search,” announced at a Jan. 15 press event, allows users to search the massive social network for posts, photos, friends (and friends of friends), and other content. Although users can sign up for a limited beta, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemed to imply that his company would limit the number of users for the near term. He also described the work as a “beta of a version 1” product, which will be rolled out to “hundreds, or thousands” of people: “The better it goes, the faster everything it will go.” Indexing the entire database of Facebook content will take quite some time, Zuckerberg added: “I just want to make sure people understand that this is a beta... I think we know our roadmap for years to come.” On the to-do list: mobile, Instagram photos, the Social Graph, plus other languages and regions. “We’re pretty confident from feedback we’ve gotten that this will be a useful for a lot of folks.” Using natural language, people will be able to search within four different topics: people, photos, places, and interests. Even those limited amount of categories offer great diversity of queries, from dating to recruitment—“Friends of friends who are single live in San Francisco and are from India,” for example, or, “TV shows that software engineers like.” Facebook has been trying to institute a social element to search for many years; the company has a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine, where users searching on Bing can ask their Facebook friends for advice and see what they’ve recommended. Under the new Graph Search interface, any query that Facebook can’t handle will be returned by Bing, such as a query for “weather in Menlo Park.” Microsoft representatives didn’t immediately return requests for comment.