Los Angeles — Early this week the net was abuzz with news that the popular social networking giant Facebook might announce an indigenous phone, but on Tuesday, the company finally unleashed its search capabilities dubbed as “Graph Search” that could be a real game changer at the world’s leading social media network in a budding challenge to Google, LinkedIn, Yelp and other Internet firms, according to one analyst.
Taking the wraps of of its unique search feature, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage at the company’s Menlo Park, Calif. offices for a press event that had been ushered by nearly a week of increasing speculation about the company’s plans. While most rumors had the company prepping a smartphone or new mobile strategy, Zuckerberg said its focus is on search.
Zuckerberg, unleashed the collective data trove behind its one billion users around the world, but sadly enough, this is only available in beta, and more wider public would not have access to it for some time, as well made it clear that this is not “web search”.
The “graph search” feature released in a test version empowers Facebook members to delve into the enormous amount of information on Facebook, which is not available on Web search engines such as Google.
Keenly explaining the concept behind its latest, he said, “We are not indexing the web.” “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.”
A budding version of graph search designed to let Facebook members do natural language searches to find places, pictures, movies and more that their friends liked began rolling out for US English language users. The feature, which would appear as a bigger search bar at the top of each page, is designed offer up an answer after combing through Facebook’s own massive treasure trove of user information.
“We look at Facebook as a big social database,” Zuckerberg said. “Just like any database, you should be able to query it.”
Early on, Facebook encouraged its massive audiences to list their favorite shows, movies, bands and other information as part of their profile, but those prompts are not part of the more condensed timeline profile. Moving forward with this release, Graphic Search now invites Facebook users to contribute more of their preferences and tastes.
“Friend connections, locations, likes, comments, tags, it all adds up to indexing all this content and making it so you can retrieve it instantaneously is a really hard technical problem.”
More so, Facebook users who mostly rely on their friends’ recommendations will soon find it easier to scrutinize the movies they have seen, vacations they have taken and restaurants they frequent with a new search tool. Graph Search will allow a quick scan of photos, statuses, check-ins or likes to put such data Relevant Products/Services at the user’s fingertips.
Sizing up the newly released feature, a prominent analyst said, “Facebook Graph Search has the potential to really change the game over time,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. “The power of Graph Search comes from Facebook’s sheer size. The more data there is to search and map, the more valuable the results. It can make Facebook a much more valuable tool.”
The social media company stressed that the new effort is intended at helping members find specific information stored within the network and in the content of friends, but had woven in the Web search power of Bing.
“I do not necessarily think a lot of people will be coming to Facebook to do Web search because of this, but it is a very good search engine,” Zuckerberg said.
Adding further, he said Facebook had discussed the project with Google but that “Microsoft was just more willing to do things that were specific to Facebook.”
The company coordinated closely with Bing on the search feature that lets people get answers to queries such as “What songs do my friends like?” along with pulling in online information from the Microsoft search engine.
“We expanded our relationship with Bing,” Facebook engineer Tom Stocky said during a press event at the social network’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, the first major announcement since Facebook went public in May.
“We worked closely with Bing to make Web search feel more a part of Facebook.”
So, as soon as you begin typing your questions, Facebook will suggest search queries and clean up your question. You might ask, “Which of my friends like The White House?” and it will simplify and suggest “My friends who like The White House.”
In fact, the search could be most useful for situations like finding friends in a specific city you plan on visiting or finding people who like a band you have got an extra ticket to see. You can also use it to search for things “nearby.” If you are looking for friends who live near your current location, you can look for “friends nearby.” If you need a hospital, you should call 911, but you could also search on Facebook, and it shows you the hospitals in your area.
Finally, with all the Facebook’s privacy assurances surrounding Graph Search, one thing will certainly prove true: Many folks, with a special emphasis on younger people, share either more than they realize on Facebook, or more than they ought to (as defined by, say, a typical adult’s sense of decorum).
Besides, some people will undoubtedly revel in using Graph Search to discover new and interesting friends, establishments, and even interests, the tool’s priority on refining results will inevitably lead to it being a power tool for creeps, too. Refining results by gender, relationship status, and location is, even with the best of intentions, a bit creepy.
Nevertheless, this kind of data exploration is a crux of Facebook’s strategy, and it is not likely that the obvious creepy potential will deter the company of its existent course. In fact, the company already gets its advertisers access to much of this kind of data already–albeit a bit more anonymized. If anything, then, one nearly inescapable eventual outcome of Graph Search will be that people end up starting to take their Facebook privacy a bit more seriously. And that is definitely a good thing.
View Graph Search pictures (here); Courtesy: (Cnet)