Today Facebook debuted new functionality, called Graph Search. My initial thought, awesome, but before we can see results like Facebook showed there are a few things that need to happen:
1. Facebook users need to share a lot, and I mean a lot, check-ins, photos with location info, where they travel, their doctors, and more. (this definitely does not pertain to many of my friend’s usage on Facebook)
2. Facebook users will need to have complete profiles. Their about section will need to list education, employment-past and present, where they grew up, where they went to college, relationship status, etc.
3. It will take time before all of this data gets shared on Facebook to see the results that Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated today.
My takeaways:
1. Privacy will not be an issue, you can only search data that you are already connected to on Facebook. *This pertains to #1 above but we’ll wait and see.
2.Businesses will have even more reason to market their products and services on Facebook.
3.You will never need to leave Facebook, what you can’t find using Graph Search you will be able to find with Bing.
4. LinkedIn & Yelp will need to step up their game. Graph Search definitely challenges those two networks, Facebook will now feature the same information but have your Facebook friend’s recommendations and connections tied to those results=POWER SEARCH.
5. I think it will be great to easily find people that you briefly met. Whether that was a friend of a friend when you were on vacation or it was a connection at a business conference. You can definitely find people now on Facebook but this advanced search makes it much easier.
I watched the live coverage by CNET, below are pictures they posted on their site, as well as direct quotes from the Facebook team.
There are three pillars of the Facebook ecosystem:
1. Newsfeed
2. Timeline
Today we’ll talk about #3, “Graph Search.”
Graph Search is a service that helps users make new connections. You can only search content that has been shared with you.
“Web Search and Graph Search are very very different.” Graph search is meant to take a search and return an answer, not a set of links like web search.
For example a search for “Who are my friends in San Francisco” would immediately pull up a list of your friends in SF. Search results are almost instant with Facebook’s new search. Focused on people, photos, places and interests.
Zuckerberg searched: “Mexican restaurants in Palo Alto, Calif, my friends have been to.” And the results pulled up a list of his friends and their opinions of the restaurants.
This is not keyword search, Zuckerberg points out. Graph search is structured. For example, ”friends who like star wars and harry potter. These results are entirely unique to you.
Facebook says this is about making new connections as well. If you meet someone in real life, and you met someone named Chris — you can type “people named Chris who are friends of Lars and went to Stanford University.” The Graph Search lets you drill down — change schools, locations, etc, until you drill down to the person you want.
Facebook says it’s a powerful recruiting tool. You can easily search for “people who have been product managers and who have been founders.”
Graph search works with photos of friends. For example you can search for “photos of friends who have been to Yosemite park.”
“Interest” search is also part of Graph Search. For example, “movies my friends like.” You can now come here and see great movies through the lens of your friends, such as TV shows your friends like. The results are a number of TV shows that your friends like. Within that, you can pull up a video clip from one of those shows — 30 Rock, Mad Men, etc
An example that was shown was if you had a terrible toothache you could search “dentists liked by my friends.” The results would be a long list of your friends and their dentists.
However, it doesn’t have to be limited to your friends. You can search: “restaurants in SF, California, liked by culinary institute of america graduates.” This returns an array of restaurants — but not based on your friends. Again, this is narrow, search in a way that Google and other don’t do.
Graph Search is a completely new way to get information on Facebook. When you can’t find what you’re looking for, Facebook has partnered w/ Bing. So better to have Web search results when Graph Search isn’t enough. Such as, “Weather in Menlo Park.”
Graph Search is a big project and will take years and years… You can sign up to get on the Graph Search waitlist here.
Q: Will there be an API?
Zuckerberg: “We’d love to, but we have years and years of work ahead of us.”
Q: Question about places?
A: We order them based on who has ‘Liked” and checkins and all of that is fed into an algorithm.
Zuckerberg: “We recently started asking people to checkin and rate places. By doing that, we’re enabling a mass amount of people to discover great restaurants.”
What do you think, will this help Facebook get more active users or drive users away?
*all photos and information summarized above are from CNET.
