Facebook unveils Graph Search


Facebook announced Graph Search, a new way to navigate people’s connections and make them more useful.
Now one can use simple, specific phrases, such as “friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter” or “Minsk restaurants my friends like” to find everything they want.
“Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected. The main way we do this is by giving people the tools to map out their relationships with the people and things they care about. We call this map the graph. It’s big and constantly expanding with new people, content and connections,” Graph Search team members said.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made it very clear that this is not web search, but completely different: “What’s more interesting than any of these things (that Facebook currently does) is giving people power and tools to take any cut of the graph that they want.”
Zuckerberg explained the difference between web search and Graph Search. “Web search is designed to take any open-ended query and give you links that might have answers.” Linking things together based on things that you’re interested in is a “very hard technical problem,” he said at Facebook’s press event on January 15, 2012.
Zuckerberg says that Graph Search is in “very early beta.” People, photos, places and interests are the focus for the first iteration of the product. It is available now in a limited beta program for English (US) audiences. If you’d like to test it, click here to get on the waitlist.
The new Graph Search product will be integrated into privacy, as well. Users can only search content they are not blocked from accessing.
There are already more than a billion people, more than 240 billion photos and more than a trillion connections.
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TWITTER