Yuyu's note: Facebook's press event is in process, what do you think the next step for this leading social network will take? Will FB kick off Google's seaching business??
Today at Facebook’s press event, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced its latest product, called Graph Search. Two of the members of the Graph Search team, Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky were very high up at Google, which is extremely important to note. Facebook is calling it a “Dream Team.”
Zuckerberg made it very clear that this is not web search, but completely different:
What’s more interesting than any of these things (that Facebook currently does) is giving people power and tools to take any cut of the graph that they want.
Zuckerberg explained the difference between web search and graph search. “Web search is designed to take any open ended query and give you links that might have answers.
Graph search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, not give you links that might provide the answer” For example, you could ask Graph Search “Who are my friends that live in San Francisco?”
Linking things together, based on things that you’re interested is a “very hard technical problem” according to Zuckerberg. The main difference from web search is that Graph Search helps you find answers to direct queries. Zuckerberg joked that a difference is “filters”, which grabbed a few chuckles.
We were shown a video that points out an autocomplete feature for search, and Zuckerberg says that Graph Search is in “very early beta.” People, photos, places and interests are the focus for the first iteration of the product.
Facebook Graph Search is completely personalized. Tom Stocky of the search team explains he gets unique results for a search of “friends who Like Star Wars and Harry Potter”. Then, “If anyone else does this search they get a completely different set of results, even if someone had the same set of friends as me, the results would be different [because we have different relationships with our friends].”
Stocky says you can also use Graph Search for Dating. He wanted to set up a girl with a potential date so he searched “Who are single men?” Stocky says “I get the set of single men that are friends of people I’m friends with.” Then he can refine that to just San Francisco, and add the filter “and are from India] since his friend is Indian.
You can use Graph Search for Recruiting. Stocky says if he was looking for people to join the team at Facebook, NASA Ames employees who are friends with people at Facebook. If I anted to reach out and recruit them, I could see who their friends are at Facebook. To refine them I can look for people who wrote they are “founders”.
Photos is another big part of Graph Search. Results are sorted by engagement so you see the ones with the most likes and comments at the top. For example, Lars Rasmussen of Facebook showed off a search for “photos of my friends taken at National Parks”. He got a gorgeous page of photos from Yosemite, Machu Pichu, and other parks.
Some more things you can do include searching for photos you Like, or a query for “Photos of Berlin, Germany in 1989″ that brings up Berlin Wall tear-down shots.
This is developing, so the stock market isn’t quite sure how to react to this news yet.
Wow!! It looks like the best thing since sliced toast!
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think?
Have a good week.
james