Facebook launches ‘Graph Search’

After much speculation, Facebook has announced a major addition to its social network: ‘Graph Search’ – a new “smart” search engine.

Facebook, which now has more than a billion users, more than 240 billion photos and more than a trillion connections, has launched the service to allow users to make “natural searches” of content shared by friends.

Founder and Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said there was no direct challenge to Google – as some earlier speculation had inferred – and that it was not a web search.

“Graph Search is a completely new way for people to get information on Facebook,” he said at a press conference at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park on Tuesday.

The first version of Graph Search – a limited preview – will only be available in english and will focus on four main areas – people, photos, places and interests.

“Graph Search and web search are very different,” clarified a Facebook blog post soon after the announcement. “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.

“Another big difference from web search is that every piece of content on Facebook has its own audience, and most content isn’t public. We’ve built Graph Search from the start with privacy in mind, and it respects the privacy and audience of each piece of content on Facebook.

“It makes finding new things much easier, but you can only see what you could already view elsewhere on Facebook.”