Facebook’s New Graph Search

As a part of the Social Solutions Collective, I blog about what’s new in social media.  With Facebook’s announcement about their new search, Graph Search, I took to the internet to give my take.

Facebook  had momentum building for a week. Their shares were up ahead of Tuesday’s well-covered press conference. Then the announcement happened.

Graph Search is a search engine that is focused on people, photos, places and interests located within Facebook. It looks promising but the announcement left everyone a little underwhelmed. There were high hopes of announcements about mobile, post editing, a Messenger iPad app or even a Facebook Smartphone. Investors were a less-than-thrilled too – Facebook’s stock dropped throughout the press conference. But back to Graph Search.

Facebook sees Graph Search as a way of answering your questions. It’s not a keyword search, but a search based on what you want.  Here are some features that were talked about:

• The results are unique to you.
• You can define your search based on any set of factors – age, gender, location, movies, music, etc.
• To deal with the privacy issue, you are only able to search for you can already see on Facebook.  If it’s hidden, you can’t search it. For more information on what this means to privacy, read this great article from Mashable.
• The searches do not have to be limited to your friends, you can search things like “football teams liked by sports journalists” and it will pull up the Facebook pages of teams that sports journalists follow or “tv shows liked by social media managers” and you will see those tv shows that are followed by social media managers.
• The searches are more narrow than Google.
• Graph Search is partnered with Microsoft’s Bing search engine so when you can find what you are looking for on Facebook, you have a web option.  Facebook said in reference to this partnership “With Graph Search you get a powerful tool and a world class search engine at the same time.”