by Avneet

Facebook Graph Search – To Google or Not to Google?

Facebook Graph Search

When Mark Zuckerberg announced the latest product which is not a web search but a different, ‘Graph Search’, the industry and the insiders went all out to talk about its necessity, functionality and potential. How it fares in the face of Google’s indelible popularity and preference is something we need to wait for.

Anyhow, Graph Search is a search function which is different. In a way that it offers not definitions but just simple plain information, pictures, locations or so to say. It is different from web search because it uses Facebook’s data compiled over the years to answer your search queries. You can know what your friends, their friends, colleagues, family and acquaintances prefer, do or choose. If you are traveling in Florence and want to find somewhere to eat chicken, your search query can be ‘chicken restaurants in Florence where Amanda’s friends go’ or ‘the music band that Jeff listens to along with Ben’.

Such queries and many more will now be answered by Facebook’s Graph Search without violating users’ privacy at all.

Whether you call it a way to save the slightly trembled fish in the pond (Read FB) or an intelligent product to offer something new to the users, Graph Search will definitely get some attention by the 1 billion profiles on Facebook that have approximately 24 billion photos and 1 trillion connections.

Graph Search is still in its Beta version and Mark Zuckerberg is all open to make any changes to make it a lot better before it is rolled out to the public. Facebook has worked with Microsoft Bing to work out the search integration.

You can use Graph Search to find your friend’s favorite eating places before you travel to a particular country, find a friend’s friend you recently met, to see pictures of a locale that your acquaintances visited, to find friends of friends who have been marketeers and so much more.

The upgraded search tool will help Facebook’s CEO to cope up with the pressure that has been built on him since the company went public last year. Since then it has been under a lot of pressure to launch new products, applications and mobile integrations.

Facebook is one of the biggest and most loved social network. With the number of users it has, the pressure to come up with new products is of course inevitable but more than pressure it should be the product’s relevance and usability that needs to drive software developers and creators. So hope that the Facebook Graph search like its parent website – Facebook rings in a revolution as well.

While measures to not violate privacy have already been taken but we can’t really certain until comes into actual use. For us, users it will be sometime before we can happily Facebook it rather than Google it as TechCrunch has put it.