Facebook Just Declared War on Google: Meet Your New Search Engine (Updating Live)
Facebook's search has been convoluted and weak for years until now—it's hard to expect what you get when you type anything in, even if it's your best friend's name. People, pages, maybe places. Boring and often broken. But with today's search monster, Zuckerberg isn't just offering you a way to find your friends (or college frenemies). And it's beyond just some attempt at a Google replacement. It's an attempt to do what Google failed at doing—pulling all the information that matters to you within the context of your social life, skipping the results that are popular to The Internet, in favor of the results that are popular within a group you actually give a damn about. Not a horde of strangers. Everyone you know uses Facebook, and now those people are going to work for you when you search.
For example: searching for a sushi restaurant won't just bring up a well-linked list a la Google. Instead, your restaurant query will be answered with a little help from your friends, presenting you with suggestions based on where your relations have checked in. Or if you're looking for music, the recent selections of your pals will inform the results. For any occasion, the answer doesn't lie with some invisible algorithm pointed out toward the web void, but at the people you know, who are doing or have done the thing you're talking about. Your friends' experiences will give you answers to what you're wondering. At least that's the idea. And if it works, we'll have all the reason to skip opening a new tab headed to Google.com—an enormous victory for Facebook, and a profound change in how we all use the Internet every single day.
So how does Graph Search work?
Graph Search is a live, constantly updating list of results, triggered from a nice thick search box at the top left of the page. It changes as you type, a la Google's autocomplete queries.
As you start typing, say, "photos of my friends," results will pop up. If you add "taken in 2008," you'll get those photos.
Searches are built using simple, natural language searches. "Friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter." "What music do my friends like?" Even more complicated questions, like "People named Brian who went to Princeton and like Star Wars."
It looks incredibly fast, and allows for the kind of spastic hopping around that's become natural on Facebook. Every piece of data you share on Facebook, now searchable, will be privacy aware—meaning it's only available to the friends you want it to be available to, not the web. You won't be dumped into some Internet database.
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