Facebook Graph Search Is Headed to Your Account

Over the next few weeks, expect your Facebook account to be updated

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."