Social search tools have been announced by Facebook at a special event in at the company’s HQ in California. The unveiling ceremony yesterday evening started with a strike of a gong, as it traditional for Facebook’s biggest announcements. Mark Zuckerberg insisted during the event that this was not a web search or a competitor to Google, but for “natural” search of content shared by friends. However the search tools would be complemented by Bing results when the “Graph Search” didn’t find answers.
The widely teased event has left a few commentators a little underwhelmed. Before the event, which started at 6PM UK time, there had been all sorts of rumours about, iPad apps, cloud computing data centres, video ads and even the oft rumoured Facebook smartphone. However Zuckerberg, wearing his traditional hoodie and trying to be enthusiastic, said of Graph Search “So this is just some really neat stuff, um, this is one of the coolest things that I think we’ve done, in a while.”
ABC News was at the event
The Graph Search function goes somewhere to alter the usefulness of Facebook and change it from a giant scrapbook into a friend query search engine. Most of the queries demonstrated at the event included the word “friends” within their terms; such as “friends who work at XXXXX” and “restaurants my friends liked in XXXXX” – the Graph Search would suggest autocompletions of these phrases. A big difference between your Facebook searches and your Google searches are the friend recommendations and because of this it might be popular, for example, in looking for goods and services where it’s difficult to know of their quality without experience, like restaurants.
autocomplete in action
With an eye on privacy Facebook said that only content that people have shared would be used in Graph Search. The functionality will be rolled out “very slowly” said Zuckerberg. When it’s available in your region it will be integrated into the upper blue banner where the current search tool exists.
