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| Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Graph Search at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park in January. He said at the time the tool was not a web search and is not an attempt to take on Google. He added that only publicly shared information and information shared with friends is scanned and used for the results |
Facebook has begun rolling out its Graph Search to English-speaking users, enabling them to find out specific details about their friends.
Previously Facebook users could only search for brands or friends by name and location; Graph Search lets users find specific information including their friends' favourite films, restaurants, likes and dislikes, work and education history and more, using filters.
For example, users can search for friends in London who are vegetarians, friends of friends who like yoga, or photos of a boyfriend from a certain month or year.
The tool was launched in January to a select number of beta users and engineers.
After months of refining and tweaking, it is now being launched to every Facebook user whose language is set to U.S. English.
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| Facebook has begun rolling out its Graph Search, pictured, which lets users find specific information about their friends using filters. Users can search for people who like cycling and are from London, for example, friends of friends who like yoga, or photos of friends or boyfriends from a certain month or year |
Unlike searches on Google, which are good for finding specific things like roasted kale recipes or Mizuno running shoes, Facebook's tool is most useful in unearthing information about your social circles.
It can help users discover new music or films, or get restaurant recommendations from friends who have been there.
Facebook claims that Graph Search is a better way to find out which of your friends have common interests.
The tool uses ‘intelligent’ interpretation to allow you to find friends by interest, for example Facebook suggests typing in text such as 'Friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter' when planning a film night.
Yet it could also be used in the future by advertisers and marketers to learn more about you and target users with more personalised adverts.
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| One of the Facebook search result pages, showing friends who have interests in common. This search in particular looked for friends 'who like the things I like'. The data it used for this search was based on pages and activities that friends had 'Liked' on Facebook |
In recent months Facebook has been encouraging people to enter more information about themselves on their profiles, including work and education history, family information and so on.
Graph Search uses any of this information about you that you have shared publicly - plus any pages that you've liked - including relationship statuses, addresses, phone numbers and check-ins.
This includes data shared with friends and friends of friends.
However, any information that is set as private, or has been shared with only a select group of people, will not be used to populate the graphs.
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| As well as information about a friend's location, likes and favourite films, Graph Search can be used to find photos from a particular time. This makes it easier for users to discover embarrassing baby photos, or photos from university, for example. This image shows photos of friends from before 1999 |
Speaking at the launch in January, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg said it is 'not web search’ - but the firm has partnered with Microsoft's Bing search engine in a snub to Google, which has its own social network, Google+.
Soon after Facebook launched the tool a number of joke blogs were set up looking at the less innocuous and more embarrassing queries.
For example, with Graph Search you can find out which brand of condoms your friends prefer.
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 results.
The blog was created to highlight how much personal information people share online.
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.'
It's easier, for example, to find a long-lost classmate with a common name, or to find common interests with friends of friends.
Facebook does not currently show users ads based on what they are searching for but the company may do in the future.
Research firm eMarketer estimates that Google will take nearly 42 percent of all U.S. digital ad spending this year, well above Facebook's share of less than 7 percent.
With its new search tool, Facebook is clearly trying to divert traffic and ad spending from its rival. Whether this will work will become more clear as more people begin using it.
Culled from DAILY MAIL
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