Facebook has overhauled its search engine in a bid to take on Google, letting users search for people, photos, places and other content that has already been shared on the social network.
At a ‘mystery event’ from the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the service, dubbed Graph Search.
Zuckerberg, 28, stressed that the new product was “very, very different” to web search engines offered by other tech giants such as Google because it only looks for data on Facebook itself.
For example, users could search for “people who like fencing and live in Palo Alto” or “films my friends like” or “restaurants recommended in New York”.
Facebook Graph Search is currently in a very limited Beta phase, with only a handful of people testing it.
The tool will appear as a bigger search bar at the top of each Facebook page.
When users search for something, that search not only determines the set of results they get, but also serves as a title for the page. Users can also edit the title and create a custom view of the content shared on Facebook.
To calm privacy fears, Facebook said Graph Search uses the same privacy settings as a user’s normal profile, so no privacy settings need to be changed and user can choose to opt their content out of search results.
The first version of Graph Search focuses on four main areas — people, photos, places, and interests. Facebook gives the following examples for searches:
People: “friends who live in my city,” “people from my hometown who like hiking,” “friends of friends who have been to Yosemite National Park,” “software engineers who live in San Francisco and like skiing,” “people who like things I like,” “people who like tennis and live nearby”
Photos: “photos I like,” “photos of my family,” “photos of my friends before 1999,” “photos of my friends taken in New York,” “photos of the Eiffel Tower”
Places: “restaurants in San Francisco,” “cities visited by my family,” “Indian restaurants liked by my friends from India,” “tourist attractions in Italy visited by my friends,” “restaurants in New York liked by chefs,” “countries my friends have visited”
Interests: “music my friends like,” “movies liked by people who like movies I like,” “languages my friends speak,” “strategy games played by friends of my friends,” “movies liked by people who are film directors,” “books read by CEOs”
Zuckerberg said the new search tool would be rolled out “very slowly”, starting with a beta version available to a limited number of users from today.
“This is one of the coolest things we have done in a while,” he said, adding: “Graph Search is the kind of product that we love to build at Facebook – it’s a big technology problem and it’s also a big social problem. It’s a kind of problem that Facebook and our culture are uniquely suited to build.”
Although he repeatedly stressed the new service was different from a web search, Zuckerberg said Graph Search would be “integrated” with Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
Watch Zuckerberg talk about the new service here:
Searches that are not “mapped out” by Graph Search will be redirected to Bing, under an agreement between Facebook and Microsoft.
Asked whether this targeted Google, Zuckerberg said: “You know, I would love to work with Google – when we did our Bing web search integration we were very public about the fact this wasn’t something we were trying to do with Bing. We want to make web search social in general.”
Questions immediately arose over how the new tool will affect Facebook users’ privacy.
But Facebook insisted that the feature included an opt-out option to keep user’s content out of searches.
Watch a video explaining how the service works below:
Watch Facebook explain how privacy is handle with Graph Search here:
https://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch/
