Facebook Releases Beta of Graph Search

From DailyTech: Facebook revealed a new social search feature called "Graph Search" today, which will provide any public information users ask of regarding others on the social network.

Graph Search, which is still in beta, is a search engine that grabs information off of Facebook instead of the whole World Wide Web. For instance, a user can type "Friends who live in my city," and Graph Search will provide photos and profiles of friends that live in that user's city. Another example is typing "Photos of my friends before 1999," and a collage of photos of friends before 1999 will appear.

The new feature is separated into four categories: People, photos, places and interests. Users can search under any of these categories to find others and information from or about others.

"Graph Search and web search are very different," said Facebook's Tom Stocky and Lars Rasmussen in a blog post. "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."

When announcing the new feature today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was careful to note that users can only search information that is available to them. If something was kept private from them, they cannot search and find it.

For now, Graph Search is only offered in English and will present itself as a larger search bar at the top of each page. To get a glimpse of the beta, go here.

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