Facebook Introduces Graph Search
Facebook announced today their new social media tool Graph Search. Mapping out its users’ relationships and commonalities, Graph Search encompasses all of Facebook’s billion plus users, their 240 billion photos and more than one trillion connections.
A tool that will appear at the top of each page as a larger search bar, Graph Search will analyze a multitude of attributes to give users relevant results.
“Graph Search and web search are very different. Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: “hip hop”) and provide the best possible results that match those keywords. With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: "my friends in New York who like Jay-Z") to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that's been shared on Facebook. We believe they have very different uses,” said Facebook in an official statement.
As privacy is incredibly important to Facebook users, Facebook kept it in mind when developing the new tool, thus results only include content that users could already view on Facebook. Graph Search is available in beta as of today.
Graph Search uses four main focuses for its usage including people, photos, places and interests. Facebook provided the following examples:
People: “friends who live in my city,” “people from my hometown who like hiking,” “friends of friends who have been to Yosemite National Park,” “software engineers who live in San Francisco and like skiing," "people who like things I like," "people who like tennis and live nearby"
Photos: “photos I like,” “photos of my family,” “photos of my friends before 1999,” "photos of my friends taken in New York," “photos of the Eiffel Tower”
Places: “restaurants in San Francisco,” “cities visited by my family,” "Indian restaurants liked by my friends from India," “tourist attractions in Italy visited by my friends,” “restaurants in New York liked by chefs," "countries my friends have visited"
Interests: “music my friends like,” “movies liked by people who like movies I like,” "languages my friends speak," “strategy games played by friends of my friends,” "movies liked by people who are film directors," "books read by CEOs"