Facebook launches Graph Search

Facebook has announced the release of its own search engine, Graph Search. The new feature allows you to filter pictures, messages and posts of your friends. Mark Zuckerberg claimed that the new feature could transform how people use Facebook.

For those of you worried about the Privacy of their profiles, Facebook have said the Graph Search is “privacy aware” and won’t put your entire profile at the mercy of random users.

It will however let you search for people you know in any city or country and will also let you find recommendations for pretty much anything (e.g. restaurants).

Graph Search can also be used to find, for example, ‘friends who live in London and like skiing’ or ‘pictures of friends before 1995”. This seems like more of a novelty feature but could make it easier to look up your friends.

The purpose of this new feature, apart from recommendations, is to make it easier to find other people you may know. For instance, if you met someone at a party you can find them based on where they work or worked, where they studied, their first name or through a mutual friend. Yet with privacy issues, this will only work for the people with open profiles, which is the minority of us making this feature a little pointless.

However it will make it easier to find certain photos of your friends as Facebook has indexed photo search, which lets you easily filter pictures by searching for a keyword.

Facebook have also integrated Bing enabling you to search the World Wide Web through the Social Network, which is good news for Microsoft but I can’t see it having too much effect on Google’s market share.

Facebook Graph Search is available in a limited beta, but will be slowly rolled out to everyone else in the near future.

By Luke Stanley
SEO Consultant