Facebook’s Graph Search

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Facebook’s Graph Search

Facebook introduced a new version of search on the site called Graph Search late yesterday night. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook now has three pillars, namely Newsfeed, Timeline and now Graph Search. Graph Search is still in beta mode and when it does go live it will be available on desktop first. Mobile version of Graph Search will still take some time.

 Graph Search will appear at the top of each page as a bigger search bar. When you search for something on Facebook, that search not only determines the set of results you get, but also serves as a title for the page. Facebook is giving users the option to edit the title of the page.

Zuckerberg explained out at the very beginning of his presentation. Instead Graph search will look at phrases that you type and give you results based on what your friends have shared.Naturally, not everything you type into the Graph Search field will be on Facebook. So if Facebook has no idea what to do with your search terms, it will display results from Bing Big news for Bing, mildly bad news for Google. 

Privacy:

Again Zuckerberg was keen to emphasise this during the press event and it seems Graph Search will not shred your privacy settings. Only results that you have shared with friends, friends of friends, or the public, will be found by other people. Photos, updates and links that keep at a custom setting of “Me only” won’t be displayed in Graph Search.

Obviously, Facebook is talking about its privacy advancements, like Privacy Shortcuts from a few weeks ago. But the fact remains that this is going to be a hugely powerful way to be creepy on Facebook. You can already accomplish that pretty easily, but merging the powers of a recruiting service and dating website with your real life friends and acquaintances is going to have some unexpected side effects.

Graph search in Future:

Maybe the biggest thing to know about Graph Search is that it's going to grow hand-in-hand with Open Graph. Facebook says that everything shared in Open Graph will eventually be available for search in Graph Search, meaning every like, post, comment. Zuckerberg said at the conference, “We are indexing our map of the graph, which is really big and constantly changing. Almost a million new people every day. 

240 billion photos. 1 billion people. 1 trillion connections.” So yes Facebook has a lot of data and it’s going to try and let you search around it.