Facebook launches crucial social search engine, blows the name
The world's largest social network is launching a powerful new
tool to search and discover things your friends are posting (and
talking) about, but they got one thing wrong already.
Facebook Graph Search was announced today by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
It lets you sift through all the stuff your friends have posted to find what you're looking for.
So if you want to find a good sushi restaurant, for example, search for “sushi restaurants my friends like” and you'll see a list of their posts, photos and page 'Likes' about sushi.
You may also search out things that others may have posted about (if their privacy settings aren't set to a high level).
Facebook Graph Search is all about finding things your friends have posted about – and what they recommend.
This is taking the power of word-of-mouth to the next level.
But Google can't produce the type of social search results Facebook can. And Google is still the undisputed search engine king.
If FGS does take off, it could pose a serious problem for Google. The search engine makes a lot of it's money off advertising – and that advertising is driven by search.
But it'll also be interesting to see how each user's privacy settings will have to be adjusted to keep your content safe. Zuckerberg says privacy controls were taken into account...but then again, what does he his family know about privacy?
In any case, the feature is being slowly rolled out to English-language users.
Are you looking forward to using Facebook Graph Search? Will you ditch Google for it?
- Maurice Cacho, MSN Tech & Gadgets
Comments
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Posted by: Tom | Jan 26, 2013 8:29:35 AM
Excellent post. I just loved the way you have wrote about Facebook !