At a press event today, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced Graph Search. According to Facebook website, ‘Graph Search helps you to look up anything shared with you on Facebook, and others can find stuff you’ve shared with them. Each person sees unique results.”
According Zuckerberg Facebook new search tool is different from what Google is providing.
“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,” Zuckerberg stated. “Graph Search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, rather than links that might provide the answer. For example, you could ask Graph Search – Who are my friends that live in San Francisco?”
High praised were given to two members of the two members of the Graph Search team, Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky former Google employees. This development would not go down lightly in Mountain View despite Zuckerberg’s reassurance that Google search is not at risk.
For years now, Facebook watchers have wondered when the company would unleash the potential of its underpowered search bar. Nobody has feared this day more than Google, which suddenly faces a competitor able to index tons of data that Google’s own search engine can’t access,” Steven Levy writes for Wired. “They have also wondered how a Facebook search product might work. Now we know. Graph Search is fundamentally different from web search. Instead of a Google-like effort to help users find answers from a stitched-together corpus of all the world’s information, Facebook is helping them tap its vast, monolithic database to make better use of their “social graph,” the term Zuckerberg uses to describe the network of one’s relationships with friends, acquaintances, favorite celebrities, and preferred brands.”
Steven’s article for Wired is especially great in that it revealed how the top guys at Facebook feel about Graph Search.
Zuckerberg on recruitment:
[quote] Let’s say we’re trying to find engineers at Google who are friends of engineers at Facebook. He typed in the query and found, not surprisingly, that there were lots of people who met those criteria. Each one was represented by a little rectangle of information — their profile photo, along with snippets of key information like where they went to school, where they live, and the names of the mutual friends.
The good thing is that there’s people at the end of these connections. You can find the right people or content page and then send a message.[/quote]
