Facebook Announcement: Graph Search Introduced!
Facebook's big announcement today(01-15-2013) involved the unveiling of a customized Facebook search engine called Graph Search. So what is this thing's deal?
"Graph Search is not a web search," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg and the tool’s creators showed how you can use Graph Search to dig through Facebook to find exactly who or what you want to find.
Zuckerberg, for example, said he and wife, Priscilla Chan, recently used it to search for “Mexican restaurants nearby that my friends have been to.”“We found a place and it was good,” he reported.
The Facebook crew also emphasized how Graph Search will enable more efficient Facebook-stalking ... in a positive, privacy-protected wa of course.
The tool essentially allows you to put natural queries into a search engine to make it easier to mine information from the massive Facebook ether.
Sensitive to recent privacy freak-outs around their products, Zuckerberg and Co. emphasized the “privacy awareness” of the new search engine.
“You want a search tool that gives you access to just things that people have shared with you,” he said. “I can only search for what I can already see on Facebook."
“You can only search for the content people have shared with you."
What do you think you might use Facebook Graph Search for? Does it intimidate you, given the recent privacy concerns at FB? Are you just like "meh"?
- “Photos of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan”
- “Friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter.” (Stocky has 16 such friends.)
- “Languages my friends speak”
- “Music liked by people who like Mitt Romney” and “Music liked by people who like Obama”(Beatles was the only common ground
- “Indian restaurants liked by my friends from India“
- “People who like trail running/road trips/dancing” (Better ways to figure out who you want to hang out with)
- “Photos of Facebook employees”
- “People named Chris who are friends with Lars and went to Stanford” (To connect with someone you met briefly and want to track down)
- “My friends of friends who are single men and San Francisco residents and who are from India”
What They Say:
“We found a place and it was good,” he reported.
“I can only search for what I can already see on Facebook,” added director of product management, Tom Stocky.
“It’s useful for dating,” said Stocky, performing that last search on behalf of his wife’s cousin who is single.
“This is some really neat stuff,” says Zuckerberg. “This is the coolest thing we’ve done in a while."
“Any time we roll out a completely new way to see information on Facebook, people always ask what new things people will be able to see,” says Zuckerberg. “We take this really seriously.”
