The new engine, dubbed Graph Search, was announced at a media
event at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Tuesday, ending
weeks of speculation that the social networking giant may be prepping
its own branded smartphone or a new mobile app.
The Graph Search tool was touted by Facebook CEO and founder Mark
Zuckerberg as being an intuitive search engine that lets users perform
searches with “natural” language rather than keywords. Unlike most
search engines, Graph Search was built to respond to longer queries like
“People who like tennis and live nearby” or “Sushi restaurants in Palo
Alto my friends have liked” rather than the shorter keyword searches
performed by sites like Google
Graph Search can also handle queries related to photos, allowing
users to search for “Photos of my family” or “Photos of my friends taken
in Italy,” for example.
Facebook further distinguished Graph Search from generic Web search
engines by explaining that every piece of content retrieved has “its own
audience” and can’t necessarily be seen by everybody on the site. Graph
Search will only display content to users who would have been able to
see it anyway, per their pre-existing privacy controls.
“We’ve built Graph Search from the start with privacy in mind, and it
respects the privacy and audience of each piece of content on
Facebook,” wrote Tom Stocky, director of product management at Facebook,
and Lars Rasmussen, director of engineering at Facebook, in the company
blog Tuesday. “It makes finding new things much easier, but you can
only see what you could already view elsewhere on Facebook.”
Privacy concerns among Facebook users escalated last year, when the
networking site killed off a feature allowing users to vote to change
certain governance or privacy settings.
According to Eden Zoller, principal analyst at Ovum, Graph Search
will significantly improve Facebook’s search function, but it could also
thrust the company’s “mixed track record” with privacy back into the
spotlight.
“Before the arrival of Facebook’s Graph Search, the search function
on Facebook was basic and as such, a wasted opportunity given Facebook’s
imperative to strengthen advertising revenues. Facebook Graph Search
will no doubt leverage member data to provide advertisers with more
targeted, personalized advertising opportunities going forward,” Zoller
said in a statement Tuesday. “But Facebook needs tread very carefully
here and be mindful of user privacy. It claims to have built Graph
Search with privacy in mind, but Facebook has a mixed track record on
this front and is in the habit of pushing privacy to the limits of what
is acceptable.”
Investors also appeared unsure about the new Graph Search tool, with Facebook shares dropping 2.6 percent Tuesday afternoon.
Facebook said Graph Search is still in the “very early” stages of
development. The tool is available in beta today, with the final version
being built over the coming months. Once completed, Graph Search will
likely be embraced by companies advertising on Facebook, as it will help
them send customized ads to users based on their gender, age or
location.
When Graph Search officially goes live, Zuckerberg said it will join
the Timeline and Newsfeed features as the “third pillar” of Facebook.
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