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Facebook announces ‘Graph Search’ beta to mine information from its 1 billion users

Lewis Leong

Lewis Leong

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facebook graph search iconFacebook announced its ‘Graph Search’ beta at its mysterious press conference today in Menlo Park, California. Graph Search will leverage public information and information your friends share with you to give you very specific search results.

Facebook is being cautious with this latest release by being more transparent to users. Since Graph Search is still in beta, it will roll out slowly to users over in the coming months. Users will also have the opportunity to review their searchable information in their updated Activity Log before Graph Search is activated.

Graph Search offers some stiff competition for search companies like Google, but also for companies like LinkedIn. Facebook showed how its natural language search can be used as a powerful recruiting tool, something LinkedIn has been offering companies.

Here’s how it works.

Say you’re looking for a new restaurant to try out. You can type into the Graph Search bar, “What restaurants do my friends in San Francisco like?” and Facebook will give you a list of results immediately, organized by how close you are with the friends that have visited or liked each restaurant. Facebook’s Graph Search will integrate with 3rd party services like Foursquare to deliver the most relevant results for you. Other search results will be provided by Bing, to the chagrin of Google, no doubt.

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While Graph Search doesn’t compete directly with Google’s search (it doesn’t index the web), it definitely tries to take some of its market share. Take Google Local search, a tool used to look up businesses. Facebook can provide you with more relevant results than Google can by leveraging information it has about your friends. Google Local search can only give you basic results that may or may not be relevant to you.

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Lars Rasmussen, the ex-Googler behind Graph Search, showed how powerful its natural language capabilities are. Graph Search was able to parse names of your friends, places, and other types of natural language.

Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, also took some time to dismiss rumors of a Facebook phone. He said, “It’s clearly a bad strategy for us. There are many things we can build on another operating system. Building our own phone would not make much sense to us.”

Graph Search is an aggressive move by Facebook. Google should be worried.

What do you think of Facebook’s Graph Search? Is it a useful tool or another privacy nightmare?

Lewis Leong

Lewis Leong

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