Facebook has announced a major addition to its social network – a smart search engine it has called “Graph Search“.
The feature allows users to make “natural” searches of content shared by their friends.
Based on the limited information available so far, Graph Search seems to be an innovative take on search and recommendation engines, framing typical search results like restaurants and movies against their relevance in your social graph.
This could allow users to search for “movies liked by Stanford students” or “dentists my friends have visited in the last month”. Significantly, Graph Search also has the potential to transform Facebook into a friend, job, and dating discovery platform, since queries often will revolve around finding people who share some quality or connection of interest. A user could theoretically look for friends of friends who work at a prospective employer, or for people in a certain age range and city who like a certain band and thus might want to attend a local concert with you.
So much of Facebook so far has been about connecting to people you’ve met in real life, but this could be the missing link to help broaden your social network and meet new friends, privacy settings permitting of course.
While no API or marketing integration is currently available, we believe this new tool further pushes the mentality that any brand should always be publishing engaging and current content to its fans.
It’s also likely that Graph Search will take great advantage of the Open Graph action data that Facebook users allow to be public (or in a friend’s search, viewable by friends); this means that as a brand, there is great incentive to have your marketing allow for users to publish Open Graph stories like Watch or Want, since this data might some day help your content or business locations surface higher in socially contextual searches.
Stay tuned for more on Facebook Graph Search soon!
– Jonathan Eccles, Product Manager – Social Integration
