Facebook launched an important new feature a couple weeks ago called Graph Search. It is still in beta and has not been released to all users yet. However, you would hardly know that with the buzz that it has created in the social media community. Why is it big news? Mark Zuckerberg explains how important graph search is to the social network, “Facebook is comprised of three main pillars: what’s going on with the world around users (news feed), what’s going on with themselves (timeline), and now what their friends are doing (graph search).” This has big implications for not only Facebook, but its users and the internet as a whole. Graph Search is likely to change searching on the internet as we know it into a multi-dimensional, faceted activity instead of the singular search activity we are used to now.
What is Facebook Graph Search and how does it work? Facebook’s intention behind this new feature is to allow its users to discover relationships and explore those relationships with the tools that Facebook’s Graph Search gives them. It will soon be possible to search for correlations between their friends’ likes, interests, places they have visited, purchased they have made, and more. It gives a multi-dimensional aspect to the search, for example, searching “Miami friends sushi” yields a variety of different results.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
It gives Facebook users a much better idea of how connections are made across the social network. There are almost an infinite amount of combinations that you can search for to find friends with similarities to what you want. It can also help if you are trying to crowd source buying decisions, which will come in handy, especially when making large purchase decisions such as a car. Another thing that makes Facebook’s Graph Search stand out is that each person’s search is unique and personalized; tailored only to their friends and what their friends have shared with them.
What does this mean for privacy? Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was very careful to stress that users’ privacy remains the same and intact. The only things available in the Graph Search are things that individuals have shared with the searcher. After the initial Graph Search announcement, more privacy concerns popped up. Facebook took charge and updated their privacy information with specific FAQ section with answers to specific questions about Graph Search features. For example, one of the questions answered there is, “Can people see things about my friends through graph search?” Facebook is making a smart move by announcing the change well ahead of time, and making sure that users are not surprised. That is good because surprised Facebook users tend to get quite upset.
What does this mean for Google and the other search engines? The implications are far reaching across the entire internet, but whether or not this new search makes a threat to Google and Bing’s search dominance and supremacy remains to be seen. Facebook specified that Graph Search is different than all the other search engines now, because Facebook’s new search is about connections making it not only different but more efficient according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who also said that he would love to work with Google. Graph Search allows users to search for “videos of TV shows my friends like”, “pictures of my friends before 1999”, and any number of other details. Once you start to type queries into the search bar, it automatically begins to auto fill additional filters to increase the search dimensions.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Much of the accuracy and details of the complex search will depend on how much and what Facebook users share, and their activity level. The less activity a user participates in, the more unreliable or incomplete their friends’ Graph Search results will be. Therefore, the success of the Graph Search will depend on whether or not Facebook can get more users to participate and share more information. Because Facebook has such a large membership base of people that share and like so many millions of things, mining that data for search results just makes sense. It will give Facebook users access to an infinite amount of information about their friends. If you are eager to try the new Graph Search, there is a waiting list. As Facebook tweaks and develops this technology, it will grow and morph into something that only time will tell its reaching effects.