FB: “Find people who share your interests: Want to start a book club or find a gym buddy? Connect with friends who like the same activities – and meet new people, too. – Explore your world through photos: Now you can use simple, specific phrases like ‘Photos my friends took in New York City’ to find anything you want. – Discover restaurants, music and more: Explore new places to eat and new bands to listen to – all through people you know. – Graph Search is available now in a very limited beta program for English (US) audiences. Sign up now to find out when you can start using Graph Search.”
TC: “What Can You Search For On Facebook Graph Search? – Great, Facebook launched something called Graph Search. But how does it actually help you? From content discovery to finding a restaurant, from recruiting to dating to a trip down memory lane, here’s what you can do with Graph Search. … Then let’s look at some questions Google, Yelp, and LinkedIn couldn’t answer but Graph Search can. … Some of these searches are silly, but a lot are actually useful. With time, Facebook plans to index posts and links we share, as well as events and activity from apps like Instagram into Graph Search to make it even better. There’s still a lot it can’t do, and plenty of phrases it doesn’t understand, but for version 1 of an attempt at a natural language search engine, Facebook didn’t do too badly.”
FB: “Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected. The main way we do this is by giving people the tools to map out their relationships with the people and things they care about. We call this map the graph. It’s big and constantly expanding with new people, content and connections. There are already more than a billion people, more than 240 billion photos and more than a trillion connections. – Today we’re announcing a new way to navigate these connections and make them more useful. We’re calling it Graph Search, and it starts today with a limited preview, or beta. … Graph Search takes us back to our roots and allows people to use the graph to make new connections. … Graph Search will appear as a bigger search bar at the top of each page. When you search for something, that search not only determines the set of results you get, but also serves as a title for the page. … Graph Search and web search are very different. Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: ‘hip hop’) and provide the best possible results that match those keywords. With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: ‘my friends in New York who like Jay-Z’) to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that’s been shared on Facebook. We believe they have very different uses. – Another big difference from web search is that every piece of content on Facebook has its own audience, and most content isn’t public. We’ve built Graph Search from the start with privacy in mind, and it respects the privacy and audience of each piece of content on Facebook. – We’re very early in the development of Graph Search. It’s only available in English today and you can search for only a subset of content on Facebook. … The first version of Graph Search focuses on four main areas – people, photos, places, and interests.”
FB: “How Privacy Works with Graph Search – Your privacy choices determine what’s searchable – With Graph Search, you can look up anything shared with you on Facebook, and others can find stuff you’ve shared with them, including content set to Public. That means different people see different results.”
TC: “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.’ Linking things together based on things that you’re interested in is a ‘very hard technical problem,’ according to Zuckerberg. ‘Graph Search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, rather than links that might provide the answer.’ For example, you could ask Graph Search ‘Who are my friends that live in San Francisco?’ Zuckerberg joked that a difference is ‘filters,’ which grabbed a few chuckles. … Zuckerberg says that Graph Search is in ‘very early beta.’ … Facebook Graph Search is completely personalized. … The interest search portion of Graph Search is pretty extensive, unlocking all types of content on Facebook. This is why the company has been collecting your interests for all of these years. Graph Search makes it so that you’ll never want to leave Facebook. Before, to find out what your friends liked, you had to go to everyone’s different profile. … It seems a lot like Amazon, but for interest discovery rather than purchasing – at least for now. … The new Graph Search product will be integrated into privacy, as well. In the upper-right of Facebook’s bar, you will find shortcuts to privacy settings. You can granularly control which photos show up to the world, which will of course remove them from search results. … Graph Search won’t just change the way we use Facebook. It could also pull users away from other services like Yelp and Foursquare, and create huge advertising opportunities for Facebook. But that all depends on the social network convincing us that when we have a question to answer, you don’t just have to Google it. Now you can Facebook it.”
TNW: “Zuckerberg made it clear that this isn’t a Web search service, and that user privacy has been taken into concern. Graph search is designed to take a precise query and deliver an answer. … Zuckerberg says that Graph Search is a new way for users to get new information and connections on Facebook. When asked by Rackspace’s Robert Scoble about if there’s going to be an API available, Zuckerberg says it’s going to take some time and right now the service is focused on people, photos, and interests. … In order to get the power of Graph Search, Zuckerberg says that you need to try it out yourself. He says that this new feature forms the ‘Third Pillar’ of the ecosystem, with the other two answering queries such as ‘what’s going on around them’ (seen in the News Feed) and ‘what’s going on in their life’ (seen in the Timeline). … The company emphasized that Facebook recently updated its privacy settings where users can control what’s being seen. One of the objectives is to highlight the Activity Log in which users can look at photos and content that they’re tagged in and have it either taken down, resulting in the removal of tags and notifies the original poster letting them know that it was embarrassing.”
VB: “‘It’s gonna take years and years to index everything,’ Zuckerberg said. ‘There’s more content we haven’t gotten to than content we have.’ Search for mobile, more languages, text posts, and Open Graph content will be coming soon. And, of course, an API is also on the roadmap, but perhaps a bit further down the line. – Monetization in the form of ads is coming, but Zuck said the company is focusing first on getting the product out of its initial beta version. … Let’s not forget to follow the money; all that engineering and infrastructure work wasn’t just to delight all you users. Search makes up the largest portion of U.S. digital advertising spending, a grand total of $17.58 billion in 2012, according to research firm eMarketer. – And right now, the lion’s share of that market belongs to King Google, which grabbed 74.5 percent of U.S. search revenues last year. That statistic has been growing over the past year, not declining in spite of Bing’s best efforts.”
FC: “Facebook’s entry into search takes the opposite approach of Google’s entry into social. Instead of staking its claim in a new category as Google+ did, Graph Search expands Facebook’s role in the social category. … Facebook evolved from a social network to a social toolkit when it launched Graph Search… Graph Search leverages Facebook’s social data to pinpoint any combination of people, places, photos and interests. … ‘We wouldn’t suggest people come and do web searches on Facebook, that’s not the intent,’ said Mark Zuckerberg… Turning Facebook’s social graph into a social tool could be valuable for advertisers because searches often proceed purchases. … Whether Search Graph becomes one of Facebook’s most valuable assets or biggest flops depends on users’ willingness to migrate their searches away from old niche standbys and onto a one-stop shop.”
BM: “Facebook is not doing search, at least not search Google-style. However, the world’s largest social network has radically re-engineered its native search experience, and the result is not only much, much better, it’s also changed my mind about the company’s long term future. … Graph Search subsumes Facebook’s previous search offering, which was extremely weak and focused mainly on the use case of navigation (finding people and pages). The new service takes full advantage of the face that Facebook is, at its core, a massive structured database of tagged entities. … The focus was on Facebook’s Newsfeed, and how an economy of value was now in place to game Facebook’s ‘edgerank’ algorithm, which determines what stories show up in a person’s feed. With Graph Search, I expect a similar ecosystem will emerge. All of a sudden, two things will be true that previously were not: Facebook users will be using search, a lot, creating liquidity in Facebook ‘SERPS.’ And secondly, there will be significant perceived value in being included in those search results, both for individuals (I want to be considered for that job at Google!) and for companies/brands (I want to message to anyone looking for a job!). … Even without incorporation of Open Graph or Posts, Graph Search is going to change the game for brands and people on the Facebook service.”
GE: “Though the initial rollout is not necessarily commercaily-focused, let’s look at the potential for ecommerce marketing. … The best way to optimize for Graph Search is to simply get as much of your content in the social graph. Beyond adding Like buttons to your home page and product pages, update your fan page frequently with posts that provoke sharing (see our post on Facebook News Feed Optimization for ideas). Explore non-product page content marketing (stay tuned for an upcoming post on content marketing for ecommerce). The point is, get site visitors to share the heck out of your content if you want a chance to be found. … Advanced fan marketing could enable a business Page administrator to query which fans like a certain TV show or event and send permission-based Facebook Messages to these users with offers (e.g. Coachella style offers, or pre-order Halo 5). – There’s a lot of potential for consumers and marketers, but the big question is, do Facebook users care about Graph Search, or is this just Facebook’s attempt to do something search-y that fizzles out?”
RWW: “Facebook Graph Search Is Boring: We Need A Unified Search AI – Here’s nothing exciting about Facebook’s Graph Search. It’s just another way to lock in free users to a mediocre, incomplete service, just like Google wants to do with Google+. Until there’s a personalized, natural-language search box that can search whatever and wherever we want, I don’t think anything else matters. … Facebook’s Graph Search will tell you things about your friends and ‘friends’ and ‘likes’ and your ‘friends’ likes’ on Facebook. It’s Facebook’s first bit of AI stalking enhancement. … So everyone who’s smart will limit the amount of information that can be found about them on Facebook, since now it’s so easy to find. People will realize that they should share only things they want people to find, and that’s a good thing. But it also means searching on Facebook will show you only a narrow band of things. … We won’t really be in the future until it works like this: We’ve got our own AI assistants who know us intimately but protect our information. We can ask them questions, and they will use every data source to find the right answer for us, not merely the best one available on a proprietary service. – Until then, all these companies will keep building their own boxes, and we’ll have to run around between them pretending it’s convenient.”
TC: “Facebook Graph Search Makes Privacy Seem Selfish – Graph Search creates a potential audience for our content who we’ll never meet. Your Like of a gentle dentist or a tranquil park, your photo of a historic landmark or must-see event could influence decisions of people for the better. But you won’t know that. Your aid falls outside your network to those who stumbled across your donation via Graph Search. – This redefines our relationship with the Facebook share box. There’s suddenly a reason to share even if you can’t immediately foresee how or to who it will be valuable. … Some people have nothing to hide. But for others whose identities aren’t necessarily aligned with their bosses or their parents, Graph Search could be a nightmare. Others still just don’t care about helping out. They’re not going to go to the trouble of Liking their favorite dentist in case it might assist a friend or a stranger. And finally there are people who just feel uncomfortable sharing so openly. – There’s nothing wrong with being any of these. If you don’t want to contribute, that’s fine, and it’s your choice. But now that Graph Search exists, it’s a choice you have to make.”
FD: “It’s a strategic shift for Facebook. The intent is clear – to keep people on Facebook longer, and to open up countless proven, search-related monetization strategies with all those businesses and services you like. … You know how everyone gets up in arms about Facebook privacy every three months or so? Graph Search will mean that not only will strangers see posts you never thought were public, strangers will see posts from forever ago that you never thought were public. Any temporal protection you had is gone as Facebook stalking gets its first power tool. … Yet by nature, the vast majority of Facebook’s knowledge is who you were, not who you are. This limitation hasn’t been an issue for Facebook because it’s relatively young and its core interactions are built around the present. Now, Graph Search will dig deeper into that were category, meaning we’ll be more and more defined by others via the brief periods of our own bad taste – the Zubaz pants lurking in all our digital closets.“
Gerrit Eicker 10:33 on 17. January 2013 Permalink |
FB: “Find people who share your interests: Want to start a book club or find a gym buddy? Connect with friends who like the same activities – and meet new people, too. – Explore your world through photos: Now you can use simple, specific phrases like ‘Photos my friends took in New York City’ to find anything you want. – Discover restaurants, music and more: Explore new places to eat and new bands to listen to – all through people you know. – Graph Search is available now in a very limited beta program for English (US) audiences. Sign up now to find out when you can start using Graph Search.”
TC: “What Can You Search For On Facebook Graph Search? – Great, Facebook launched something called Graph Search. But how does it actually help you? From content discovery to finding a restaurant, from recruiting to dating to a trip down memory lane, here’s what you can do with Graph Search. … Then let’s look at some questions Google, Yelp, and LinkedIn couldn’t answer but Graph Search can. … Some of these searches are silly, but a lot are actually useful. With time, Facebook plans to index posts and links we share, as well as events and activity from apps like Instagram into Graph Search to make it even better. There’s still a lot it can’t do, and plenty of phrases it doesn’t understand, but for version 1 of an attempt at a natural language search engine, Facebook didn’t do too badly.”
FB: “Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected. The main way we do this is by giving people the tools to map out their relationships with the people and things they care about. We call this map the graph. It’s big and constantly expanding with new people, content and connections. There are already more than a billion people, more than 240 billion photos and more than a trillion connections. – Today we’re announcing a new way to navigate these connections and make them more useful. We’re calling it Graph Search, and it starts today with a limited preview, or beta. … Graph Search takes us back to our roots and allows people to use the graph to make new connections. … Graph Search will appear as a bigger search bar at the top of each page. When you search for something, that search not only determines the set of results you get, but also serves as a title for the page. … Graph Search and web search are very different. Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: ‘hip hop’) and provide the best possible results that match those keywords. With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: ‘my friends in New York who like Jay-Z’) to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that’s been shared on Facebook. We believe they have very different uses. – Another big difference from web search is that every piece of content on Facebook has its own audience, and most content isn’t public. We’ve built Graph Search from the start with privacy in mind, and it respects the privacy and audience of each piece of content on Facebook. – We’re very early in the development of Graph Search. It’s only available in English today and you can search for only a subset of content on Facebook. … The first version of Graph Search focuses on four main areas – people, photos, places, and interests.”
FB: “How Privacy Works with Graph Search – Your privacy choices determine what’s searchable – With Graph Search, you can look up anything shared with you on Facebook, and others can find stuff you’ve shared with them, including content set to Public. That means different people see different results.”
TC: “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.’ Linking things together based on things that you’re interested in is a ‘very hard technical problem,’ according to Zuckerberg. ‘Graph Search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, rather than links that might provide the answer.’ For example, you could ask Graph Search ‘Who are my friends that live in San Francisco?’ Zuckerberg joked that a difference is ‘filters,’ which grabbed a few chuckles. … Zuckerberg says that Graph Search is in ‘very early beta.’ … Facebook Graph Search is completely personalized. … The interest search portion of Graph Search is pretty extensive, unlocking all types of content on Facebook. This is why the company has been collecting your interests for all of these years. Graph Search makes it so that you’ll never want to leave Facebook. Before, to find out what your friends liked, you had to go to everyone’s different profile. … It seems a lot like Amazon, but for interest discovery rather than purchasing – at least for now. … The new Graph Search product will be integrated into privacy, as well. In the upper-right of Facebook’s bar, you will find shortcuts to privacy settings. You can granularly control which photos show up to the world, which will of course remove them from search results. … Graph Search won’t just change the way we use Facebook. It could also pull users away from other services like Yelp and Foursquare, and create huge advertising opportunities for Facebook. But that all depends on the social network convincing us that when we have a question to answer, you don’t just have to Google it. Now you can Facebook it.”
TNW: “Zuckerberg made it clear that this isn’t a Web search service, and that user privacy has been taken into concern. Graph search is designed to take a precise query and deliver an answer. … Zuckerberg says that Graph Search is a new way for users to get new information and connections on Facebook. When asked by Rackspace’s Robert Scoble about if there’s going to be an API available, Zuckerberg says it’s going to take some time and right now the service is focused on people, photos, and interests. … In order to get the power of Graph Search, Zuckerberg says that you need to try it out yourself. He says that this new feature forms the ‘Third Pillar’ of the ecosystem, with the other two answering queries such as ‘what’s going on around them’ (seen in the News Feed) and ‘what’s going on in their life’ (seen in the Timeline). … The company emphasized that Facebook recently updated its privacy settings where users can control what’s being seen. One of the objectives is to highlight the Activity Log in which users can look at photos and content that they’re tagged in and have it either taken down, resulting in the removal of tags and notifies the original poster letting them know that it was embarrassing.”
VB: “‘It’s gonna take years and years to index everything,’ Zuckerberg said. ‘There’s more content we haven’t gotten to than content we have.’ Search for mobile, more languages, text posts, and Open Graph content will be coming soon. And, of course, an API is also on the roadmap, but perhaps a bit further down the line. – Monetization in the form of ads is coming, but Zuck said the company is focusing first on getting the product out of its initial beta version. … Let’s not forget to follow the money; all that engineering and infrastructure work wasn’t just to delight all you users. Search makes up the largest portion of U.S. digital advertising spending, a grand total of $17.58 billion in 2012, according to research firm eMarketer. – And right now, the lion’s share of that market belongs to King Google, which grabbed 74.5 percent of U.S. search revenues last year. That statistic has been growing over the past year, not declining in spite of Bing’s best efforts.”
FC: “Facebook’s entry into search takes the opposite approach of Google’s entry into social. Instead of staking its claim in a new category as Google+ did, Graph Search expands Facebook’s role in the social category. … Facebook evolved from a social network to a social toolkit when it launched Graph Search… Graph Search leverages Facebook’s social data to pinpoint any combination of people, places, photos and interests. … ‘We wouldn’t suggest people come and do web searches on Facebook, that’s not the intent,’ said Mark Zuckerberg… Turning Facebook’s social graph into a social tool could be valuable for advertisers because searches often proceed purchases. … Whether Search Graph becomes one of Facebook’s most valuable assets or biggest flops depends on users’ willingness to migrate their searches away from old niche standbys and onto a one-stop shop.”
BM: “Facebook is not doing search, at least not search Google-style. However, the world’s largest social network has radically re-engineered its native search experience, and the result is not only much, much better, it’s also changed my mind about the company’s long term future. … Graph Search subsumes Facebook’s previous search offering, which was extremely weak and focused mainly on the use case of navigation (finding people and pages). The new service takes full advantage of the face that Facebook is, at its core, a massive structured database of tagged entities. … The focus was on Facebook’s Newsfeed, and how an economy of value was now in place to game Facebook’s ‘edgerank’ algorithm, which determines what stories show up in a person’s feed. With Graph Search, I expect a similar ecosystem will emerge. All of a sudden, two things will be true that previously were not: Facebook users will be using search, a lot, creating liquidity in Facebook ‘SERPS.’ And secondly, there will be significant perceived value in being included in those search results, both for individuals (I want to be considered for that job at Google!) and for companies/brands (I want to message to anyone looking for a job!). … Even without incorporation of Open Graph or Posts, Graph Search is going to change the game for brands and people on the Facebook service.”
GE: “Though the initial rollout is not necessarily commercaily-focused, let’s look at the potential for ecommerce marketing. … The best way to optimize for Graph Search is to simply get as much of your content in the social graph. Beyond adding Like buttons to your home page and product pages, update your fan page frequently with posts that provoke sharing (see our post on Facebook News Feed Optimization for ideas). Explore non-product page content marketing (stay tuned for an upcoming post on content marketing for ecommerce). The point is, get site visitors to share the heck out of your content if you want a chance to be found. … Advanced fan marketing could enable a business Page administrator to query which fans like a certain TV show or event and send permission-based Facebook Messages to these users with offers (e.g. Coachella style offers, or pre-order Halo 5). – There’s a lot of potential for consumers and marketers, but the big question is, do Facebook users care about Graph Search, or is this just Facebook’s attempt to do something search-y that fizzles out?”
RWW: “Facebook Graph Search Is Boring: We Need A Unified Search AI – Here’s nothing exciting about Facebook’s Graph Search. It’s just another way to lock in free users to a mediocre, incomplete service, just like Google wants to do with Google+. Until there’s a personalized, natural-language search box that can search whatever and wherever we want, I don’t think anything else matters. … Facebook’s Graph Search will tell you things about your friends and ‘friends’ and ‘likes’ and your ‘friends’ likes’ on Facebook. It’s Facebook’s first bit of AI stalking enhancement. … So everyone who’s smart will limit the amount of information that can be found about them on Facebook, since now it’s so easy to find. People will realize that they should share only things they want people to find, and that’s a good thing. But it also means searching on Facebook will show you only a narrow band of things. … We won’t really be in the future until it works like this: We’ve got our own AI assistants who know us intimately but protect our information. We can ask them questions, and they will use every data source to find the right answer for us, not merely the best one available on a proprietary service. – Until then, all these companies will keep building their own boxes, and we’ll have to run around between them pretending it’s convenient.”
TC: “Facebook Graph Search Makes Privacy Seem Selfish – Graph Search creates a potential audience for our content who we’ll never meet. Your Like of a gentle dentist or a tranquil park, your photo of a historic landmark or must-see event could influence decisions of people for the better. But you won’t know that. Your aid falls outside your network to those who stumbled across your donation via Graph Search. – This redefines our relationship with the Facebook share box. There’s suddenly a reason to share even if you can’t immediately foresee how or to who it will be valuable. … Some people have nothing to hide. But for others whose identities aren’t necessarily aligned with their bosses or their parents, Graph Search could be a nightmare. Others still just don’t care about helping out. They’re not going to go to the trouble of Liking their favorite dentist in case it might assist a friend or a stranger. And finally there are people who just feel uncomfortable sharing so openly. – There’s nothing wrong with being any of these. If you don’t want to contribute, that’s fine, and it’s your choice. But now that Graph Search exists, it’s a choice you have to make.”
FD: “It’s a strategic shift for Facebook. The intent is clear – to keep people on Facebook longer, and to open up countless proven, search-related monetization strategies with all those businesses and services you like. … You know how everyone gets up in arms about Facebook privacy every three months or so? Graph Search will mean that not only will strangers see posts you never thought were public, strangers will see posts from forever ago that you never thought were public. Any temporal protection you had is gone as Facebook stalking gets its first power tool. … Yet by nature, the vast majority of Facebook’s knowledge is who you were, not who you are. This limitation hasn’t been an issue for Facebook because it’s relatively young and its core interactions are built around the present. Now, Graph Search will dig deeper into that were category, meaning we’ll be more and more defined by others via the brief periods of our own bad taste – the Zubaz pants lurking in all our digital closets.“