Facebook Graph Search to open for all

Facebook users in the US will soon start getting Graph Search – a new search tool announced in January this year that is designed to take a precise query and deliver an answer. According to an ABC News report, Facebook said that several hundreds of millions of people will get the feature this week, though it will be a few weeks before it reaches everyone who uses the site in the “US English” setting. The search feature was made available as a limited preview for English audiences only back in January. According to ABC News, Facebook says in a blog post which will be published on Monday morning: ”Over the past few months, tens of millions of people have helped improve the product just by using it and giving feedback.” Such improvements include the speed of search to accuracy — when you start typing in a search term now the tool will suggest more relevant possible searches, and can better understand what people are searching for in order to display the most relevant results first Facebook’s Graph Search allows users to search for content from their friends that has been shared with them, such as photos, information and things that have been liked by their friends. As we reported before, to give two very random examples, it is possible to search for things such as “TV shows watched by doctors” or “Music liked by people who like Mitt Romney”. The ABC News report says that Facebook is still working on making posts or status updates and comments searchable, with the mobile version also still in the works. As with any new feature from the world’s largest social network, privacy is a key concern for users. Facebook took extra care to set the record straight early on when it launched Graph Search, with Mark Zuckerberg saying that user privacy was taken into account when designing the search feature. In fact, Facebook started prompting users to take a look at their privacy settings when it announced Graph Search. Facebook also recently released an inside look at its Entity Graph, a complicated data set which maps the social network’s 100+ billion connections between people, places and interests, helping to power its Graph Search feature. Users who may have grown frustrated with Facebook's rudimentary search feature are getting an updated version designed to make it easier to find people, places and photos on the site. Facebook unveiled its social search tool in January but only made it available to a small fraction of its 1.1 billion users, as its engineers continued to tweak and test it.
Unlike searches on Google, which are good for finding specific things, Facebook's tool is useful in unearthing information about your social circles. Graph Search lets you find friends who live in San Francisco who are vegan. Friends of friends who live near you and like hiking. Photos of your boyfriend taken before you met him in 2010. Nearby restaurants that your friends like - and so on. But soon after Facebook launched the tool, the internet had a field day with less innocuous and more embarrassing queries, showing just how much information people reveal about themselves on the site, intentionally or not. Care to find out which brand of condoms your friends prefer? Graph Search might tell you. A blog called actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com posted a collection of searches ranging from "married people who like prostitutes" to "current employers of people who like racism." Both yielded more than 100 people. While it is possible that some of those Facebook users are fully aware that what they've shared is easily searchable, it is likely that some are not. It's easy to click "like" on a page and forget about it. To avoid any unpleasantness, Facebook plans to notify users that it's "getting easier for people to find photos and other things you've shared with them" along with a reminder that they can check "who can see my stuff" under their privacy settings. "The goal is to avoid bad surprises," said Nicky Jackson Colaco, privacy and safety manager at Facebook. But she stressed Facebook's view that the search tool "indexes information differently than we have ever been able to do before, in a really positive way." Facebook does not currently show users ads based on what they are searching for, but the company may do in the future. As Google has shown, it's a lucrative business. Research firm eMarketer estimates that Google will take nearly 42 per cent of all US digital ad spending this year, well above Facebook's share of less than 7 per cent. With its new search tool, Facebook is clearly trying to divert traffic and ad spending from its rival. Get ready for your Facebook search bar to start looking a little different. The improvements range from the speed of search to accuracy. Now when you begin typing in a search it will begin suggesting more relevant potential searches. Additionally, the company says it can better understand what people are searching for and will display the most relevant results first. Facebook's goal is not to replace Google, though. "Graph Search isn't Web search. We aren't duplicating what Bing does and what Google does, but rather we are making things easier for people to find on Facebook," Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said when asked about the search function at the All Things D conference earlier this summer.