As we all heard about the upcoming Facebook announcement, rumors began to swell: was it a new search engine? A phone? Was Facebook changing up your timeline again? Turns out, one of these guess was correct. Sort of.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg started quickly got right to the point of the event by reminding us of the point of their existence: "Facebook is about staying connected and making new connections," he said. He emphasized the three pillars that make Facebook what it is: the News Feed, which answers the question, "What's going on with people around me?" the TImeline or "Tell me something about this person." The third pillar is Graph Search, and will undoubtedly become the strongest in time.
Facebook is in a very special place - they have over 1 billion people actively using their social network, willingly dumping gobs and gobs of data about who they are, what they like and where they go. Graph Search allows you to be able to use that data more effectively than ever before, tweaking and refining your search down to the most minute details.
Currently, the best way to see what someone's interests are is to go to their timeline and peruse that, or check out their about page on their profile. With Graph Search, you now have the ability to see "movies my friends like" or "tv shows my friends like". And you can type in exactly like you'd say it - no special characters or capitalization needed. You're limited only by your imagination. Find tv shows liked by doctors or music liked by people according to their political affiliation.
The Search Box is the title for the page. There are no search results with links to another page, the search results ARE the answers. Zuckerberg says that Graph Search "is designed to show you the answer, not links to answers" (as Google would). Search results are ordered by how closely you're connected to these folks.
Finding friends who have similar interest, pushes engagement on Facebook, not just broadcasting, as most of us use the service for. Want to have a movie night? Find your friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter. Did someone introduce you at a networking event and you want to reconnect with new faces? Find them by searching Facebook for friends of friends.
You can easily refine search queries no matter where you are on the search page. Keep refining your results until you get exactly what you're after.
Graph Search is not just for finding new friends. Recruiters will be able to use it to find candidates for jobs they're trying to fill by searching down the exact skills needed for the position.
Graph Search is not just limited to people, either. You can search photos and places as well. See photos you've liked, photos from a certain location or photos of you and a certain friend. Find out what dentist your friends use or what restaurant they like.
On the off-chance that you're searching for something Facebook just doesn't have (like weather), they still have a partnership with Bing to get those results to you quickly and efficiently.
Last time Facebook rolled out a large change like this, they caught a lot of backlash about privacy settings. With Graph Search, you can only see content that's been shared with you, or shared publicly. The results could be drastically different, depending on who's doing the searching. Still, Facebook understands that people will have some concerns, so they're delivering tools to help you change settings en mass or tweak the privacy for nearly everything you can think of. If you have a photo album you don't want the world to see, take care of it before Graph Search goes live.
It looks oh so cool, but the public will have to wait awhile to get it, because Facebook is still working on indexing all their content. They expect to roll it out fluidly over the next several weeks and months. Get more information and sign up for the beta waiting list at
facebook.com/graphsearch--
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