Facebook on 22nd January 2013, Tuesday, launched a search engine aiming towards a better navigation amidst the deluge of information on Facebook. While announcing this new social search engine, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook Inc, said, “We look at Facebook as a big social database”. With the help of graph search engine, a Facebook user can search for a virtual representation of real world objects, be it people, places or things which he/she has shared with other users or have been tagged in and vice versa. That is, a user can hunt for any kind of creative query maintaining other users’ privacy preferences.
How does Facebook Graph Search Engine Work?
To get started with the graph search one has to sign up and join the waiting list. Currently it is available in a limited beta program for a restricted English (US) audience for feedback purpose.
Broadly the functionality of graph search can be classified into the following:
1. Searching images based on personal queries: Sometimes a user might want to take a glance over all the photos that he/she has liked, photos of a group of users, photos of one’s family, photos of people they share common interests with. And graph search enables a user to achieve answers for all these queries.
2. Personified web search: Generally when two users input a common query in a search engine, they are more likely to get the same results. But with facebook graph search, the query gets linked with the particular user, their friends, their friends of friends, their interests etc , thereby bringing different results to different users for the same query.
3. Depth of personalization: Graph search deals with queries which Internet is generally not expected to answer very precisely. It deals with queries that are more personal and has social links. For eg. , It can give you a list of classical concerts in your city that might interest you. It can give you suggestions of movies that you might love. It can tell you a book to read which your friend has loved.
4. Widened Communication: Facebook by far has been an excellent medium of communication between people who know each other. But with graph search, Facebook now allows communication with people who might not know each other but share common interests.
Thus basically graph search engine is an epitome of synchronizing the world socially into one beautiful unit using technology.
