with Graph Search.
Facebook is about to undergo a major change. The company announced
July 8 that it's readying to roll out the Graph Search function that
it introduced in January and offered in beta form to "tens of
millions" of users, who have already helped to improve it.
Graph Search will roll out to everyone who uses "U.S. English" over
the next few weeks, said Facebook.
Unlike traditional search tools, Graph Search fetches everything that
the user has personally touched or shared or "Liked." These can be
links, images, documents or friends. One can search, for example,
"friends in my city who like Theophilus London," or, "friends in
Florida who voted for Mitt Romney," and Facebook, which has been
saving every user's every iota of data since the moment they signed up
for its service, will deliver the answers.
If you search "photos of New York City," you'll see photos your
friends took and shared, as well as Public photos. The same search
will yield different results for different users, given they have
different friends.
"We look at this as the third main pillar in our business up to this
point," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a Jan. 15 press
event, introducing the technology. "We have Newsfeed, for connecting
with the people around you. We have Timeline, which tells us the
history of the people around you. And now we have Graph Search, which
will tie everything together and answer questions directly, in real
time."
In its July 8 blog post, Facebook said that since January, the speed
of Graph Search has been improved, thanks to early user feedback, and
so has "query understanding"—the software now understands more ways of
asking a question. It also does a better job of showing the most
relevant results first, and the search box has been made easier to see
and use.
"As Graph Search rolls out more widely, everyone on Facebook will see
a notice on their home page with a reminder about how to control what
they share and with whom," the post added. "This follows a similar
notice in December that highlighted new privacy tools to help people
manage what they share on Facebook."
Days after Facebook's January announcement, Microsoft announced that
its Bing search engine was also becoming more socially savvy. Bing's
social sidebar now integrates more Facebook data into results.
Bing Program Manager Nektarios Ioannides explained in a May 10 blog
post, "Let's say I'm searching for Beyonce tickets. ... I can see that
my friend has recently posted that she has an extra ticket to the
show. Now, without leaving the Bing results page, I can comment
directly to her post letting her know that I'd like to join her for
the concert."
Enterprises are also benefiting from the ability to connect people and
the information they're closely related to. For example, Telco Telenor
is using graph search technology to deliver appropriate services to
the right clients in real time, T-Mobile is using it to reply in real
time to millions of fans during sporting events, and Glassdoor is
using it to link job seekers with opportunities at the organizations
their friends and friends-of-friends work at.
Introducing Graph Search, Zuckerberg called it "one of the coolest
things we've developed in a while."
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