What Facebook’s Graph Search Is All About

So that’s what he was building in there.

Yesterday came the much-hyped Facebook announcement: a new live search engine within the site: ‘Facebook graph search’.  The skinny: A search bar will allow users to find what their friends have liked or recommended, as well as photos of friends. The search functions in three main areas: Photos, People (via their interests and profile information) and Places (i.e. venues,activities locations). Facebook users can type a query into the search box, such as “Friends who live in Norwich and like Skiiing,” or “Restaurants my friends like,” and get instant results. Facebook will rank the answers depending on the number of “likes” or the level of your interaction with their chosen person, place or photograph.

The idea is to get recommendations from your friends and friends of friends, based on their privacy settings for content they have posted, and to find people within Facebook who share your interests.  You could say it’s DatingDirect meets TripAdvisor meets Yelp meets your Facebook newsfeed ..?

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Interestingly, graph search won’t be able to search for posts and status updates that match a particular topic. (Take note, community managers) Apparently that’s on the roadmap. But Facebook says the loss shouldn’t be noticed given that this type of search is rarely done, in part because the current search feature for it isn’t very good, and this the first step towards improvement.

The Guardian have a look at industry opinion of the development and its commercial implications here.

How does a graph search differ from a web search?

The search is entirely personal and customisable. Mark Zuckerberg explained the differences between a web search and the graph search as follows:

This is infrastructure we’ve been building up for years, and it’s something that nobody else has … In general, Web search is designed to take any open-ended query and return to you links that may have answers to the questions you might have. Graph search is very different. Graph search is designed to take a precise query and return to you the answer, not links to other places where you might get it from.

For example, a Google search can show you ‘cinemas in Twickenham’,  bringing up a list of them. (Until recently, you would also have been able to see which of your Google+ contacts had +1′d any of those cinemas, which echoes this new Facebook search, but alas, no longer).  However, a Facebook graph search can show you cinemas in Twickenham liked by your friends. Or you can drill right down: nurseries liked by your friends who actually live in Twickenham, or those liked by your friends who work for a certain company, or your married friends, or … well, you get the idea.

Facebook have partnered with Bing to give users the option to bring up results beyond Facebook too: according to Bing, open graph is a potentially powerful combination of social and web search:

When you do a web search on Facebook, the new search results page features a two-column layout with Bing-powered web results appearing on the left-hand side, overlaid with social information from Facebook, including how many people like a given result. On the right hand side, you will see content from Facebook Pages and apps that are related to your search. We think this is a powerful combination.

How do those three areas of Facebook graph search work?

PHOTOS

You can find photos you and your friends have posted or been tagged in.

Others will see any photos they can see on Facebook, including photos hidden from timeline.

Users can search for photos of their friends using search terms, for example:

- Photos my friends took in New York City 

- Photos I like 

- Photo before 1990

Here’s my search for ‘Photos of me’

PEOPLE

You can find people based on things they’ve shared with you, including their interests and profile info.

You’ll see results for friends who share their city with you, people whose city is set to Public, and suggested results based on info shared with you.

Users can also search for friends and friends of friends based on the info they have put in their profiles: location, religion, relationship status, education, likes etc.  Want to find a concert partner or start a foodie group? Connect with friends who like the same activities—and meet new people (friends of friends) too. For example, you could search for:

- People who like cycling and live near Seattle 

- Music my friends like

Here’s my search for ‘People who live in my city’:

PLACES (and things)

Discover things like restaurants and films through your friends and connections.

Explore new places to eat and new films to see -all through people you know. You could search for: 

- Restaurants in London my friends have been to 

- Cities my family visited

People can also discover music, films, TV shows, and other interests based on what their friends like. If you type in something generic like, “films my friends like,” graph search will return not just links to the films’ Facebook pages, but clips, too. There are several filters that users can take advantage of, such as friends in California who went to U.C. Berkeley and like sushi. Graph search has also integrated Bing technology, so users can also use graph search as a general search engine.

Here’s my search for ‘restaurants my friends have liked’:

Graph Search and Privacy

Facebook have explained it like this: Your privacy choices determine what’s searchable.  Here are Facebook’s tips to control what information about you shows up in a graph search:

People: searches may be location based. To control who can see your current city, edit this setting in your About tab on your Timeline, or watch this video to learn how to edit this setting. I SERIOUSLY RECOMMEND that you watch the video: it’s very helpful.

Photos: You can review photos you’ve shared or have been tagged in. Watch this video to learn how to report or remove photo tags of you. (This video goes into more detail than the one above on the photo privacy options). Photos that are untagged but not deleted can still be discovered by others on Facebook.

Places: To review or remove location tags of you at any time, go to the Posts You’re Tagged In section of your Activity Log.

Apparently, when graph search goes live for everyone, there will be another prompt to review your privacy settings. But why not just do it right now?

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Facebook’s Plans for the World Wide Web

When you’re the world’s largest social network you find it difficult to let defeat slow you down. Facebook may be autocratic in the way it deals with its membership base and it may want to own the web and all its content but it is also the place where everyone goes to hangout online with their friends and it just keeps on growing. 

The curious purchase of Instagram for which Facebook paid a billion makes even less sense now with Facebook rolling out its own version of it, in apparent direct competition, unless of course, we consider the timing.

Instagram was purchased just weeks after it was made open to Android users. It provided Facebook with a plan for mobile in its pre-IPO days and it stopped a rival from gaining a surge of new members. Then with the deal yet to be inked it brought out its own app called Camera in effect competing with itself. 

Now you might think that dropping $1 billion on the table just to deny a competitor a measly 33 million members might be a steep price to pay, but not if you plan to fight that competitor at his own game and this is something Facebook might just be starting to think about. I am talking, of course, about search. Whatever you might be doing in social media and marketing search is at the heart of the web because it is how we navigate the web. 

The problem is that search is a complex business. Creating a search engine that works well is truly expensive, as Microsoft has found out, and requires the ability to not just index information fast but also assess it properly. In case you have not noticed, in the Facebook environment, Facebook search sucks. It works worse than a third wheel on a bicycle and when it provides results from outside Facebook it has to rely on BING anyway. 

Now a Facebook/BING deal is not out of the question, Industry rumours have it that it’s something that has been talked about for some time. A hint that these rumours may be based on truth is given by the very recent interest Facebook has expressed in buying Opera. 

Armed with a browser of its own, a search that works and the ever increasing depth of its social graph, Facebook could provide an alternative to search which could also help it make more money from its ad network. Should that happen we will truly have a universe populated by behemoths: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Amazon, each competing for our data and our custom. More than that however we will also have the era of the two webs. The Open Web, where Google is king and the closed, Facebook web where data can come in but can never go out. At that point marketing, complex enough as it is, will become even more complicated. 

While all this sounds like a smoothly created grand plan for total web domination it is anything but. Facebook has been struggling with itself for a long time and I have frequently catalogued its errors in articles here. For a concise overview of just what has gone wrong you should check out Prasant Naidu’s piece on How Facebook is Killing Itself.  

Having gone public the social network is now under pressure to evolve and succeed. Whether it manages to do just that, or will do what it has done to date which is pull itself in all directions at once remains to be seen. Clearly the year head is going to get even more interesting. 

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