Now, I know that social networks are very different from what we normally serve up here, but this news is a wee bit too popular to not talk about – with Facebook announcing their very own social network search capability that comes in the form of Graph Search. Basically, Graph Search would empower Facebook users to have the relevant tools in order to map out their relationships with the people and things they care about. It is a living, breathing graph, and Facebook claims that right now, with over a billion people, it translates to over 240 billion photos and over a trillion connections. Truly mind blowing figures, and these are set to grow in time. Imagine how it would be like when one day, Facebook breaks into the China market.
Graph Search will kick off by being in beta, as all great enterprises start off. Originally, Facebook required folks to browse around, learn stuff about others and purposefully make new connections. Graph Search will return to such roots, although life will be a whole lot easier as users are now about to use the graph to make new connections.
Graph Search will come across as a bigger search bar at the top of each page. Whenever you perform a search, that search will determine the set of results pulled up, and it also doubles up as a title for the page, now how about that? You are then able to edit the title and in the process, create your own custom view of the content that you and your friends have shared over on Facebook.
Graph Search is a very different animal from web search, where the latter will take in a set of keywords (for example: “hip hop”) and deliver the best possible results which match those keywords, while Graph Search helps you combine phrases (for example: “my friends in New York who like Jay-Z”) and retrieve a similar set of people, places, photos or other content that’s been shared on Facebook. How has your Graph Search experience been so far?
