FACEBOOK’S GRAPH SEARCH- A SEARCH ENGINE POWERED BY YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS



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The days leading up to todays announcement about Facebook’s graph search feature was filled with rumours about the company building a “Facebook phone”. All that excitement was shattered when the announcement came that facebook was not launching a phone but a “search” feature. Now while some people were disappointed that no phone came out, I myself was actually very excited about the new feature.
Ever since last year, I have reached a point where I felt that Facebook was slowly becoming irrelevant. I started to spend less time on the website and I started posting less and less “stuff” on it. Most of the updates on my timeline since the last year have been about posts I have been tagged in. I felt like Facebook was slowly becoming less engaging and felt like it was just a big graffiti wall filled with my friends rants about the smallest of things. My news feed became a steady stream of irrelevant “daily quotes”, game invites (I do not want to play Diamond Dash) and narcissistic photos of people inside their bathrooms. I started wondering if Facebook has become so big that it was struggling to make sense of all the data it has and continues to collect. I felt like newer apps and services were doing most of what Facebook has been offering but with a better and more engaging User experience (ie. Path, Foursquare, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) I was slowly slipping into limbo when it came to my presence in Facebook.
Then I heard the announcement today- and suddenly Facebook is looking to be more interesting and this time even more relevant. The main thing I love about Facebook’s graph search concept is the idea that it is a search engine powered by your timeline and your friends. If you search for the best Italian Restaurants in Vancouver, you do not only get a long list of Restaurants but a list of restaurants that your friends have visited, commented, and liked. The search results- as far as I understand- will be ranked based on how relevant it is to you based on your timeline data and your friends timeline data. Apparently Facebook’s engineers have slowly indexed all our data for some time now w/c has allowed them to launch this more intuitive search functionality.
I’m pretty sure this new update will be faced with a lot of criticism and a lot of alarmists will start crying foul about privacy concerns. I thought about this concern too but the new update will actually help you manage your personal data even further. Say you want to check if you have posted any compromising pictures in the last 2 years. Currently the only way to do this is to go through your Facebook timeline and find that one picture you want to hide- this could be very time consuming and frustrating. With Facebook’s graph search function you can just search for pictures you were tagged on in the last 2 years- you can even refine this search further based on location. This will allow the user to better manage the content they have shared on Facebook and giving the user more control on their privacy by allowing them to sort thru all their clutter in a more manageable way. Facebook has also mentioned during their announcement that their search feature follows your existing privacy settings. This means that if you have hidden a post from your timeline it will remain hidden.
I am very excited to use this feature but sadly I have to wait. So far the beta version will be rolled out slowly in the US. If you are in the US, you can sign up for their waiting list for the beta version thru this link
If you want more information about the things you can do thru Facebook graph search, read this article in Gizmodo, which gives you a good description of the new feature. You can also visit Facebook’s official webpage dedicated to information about their new feature here.
So what do you think about this move by Facebook? Do you think this will make your Facebook experience better? Leave your comment below.

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