Facebook has spent eight years nudging its users to share everything they like and everything they do. Now, the company is betting it has enough data so that people can find whatever they want on Facebook. Facebook’s “graph search” tool, rolled out on Tuesday, lets its more than 1 billion users trawl their network of friends to find everything from restaurants to movie recommendations and is the company’s biggest foray into online search. The tool, which the company calls graph search, is Facebook's most ambitious stab at overturning the Web search business ruled by its chief rival, Google. It is also an effort to elbow aside other web services designed to unearth specific kinds of information, like LinkedIn for jobs, Match for dates and Yelp for restaurants.
Zuckerberg explained the difference between web search and Graph Search. “Web search is designed to take any open-ended query and give you links that might have answers.” Linking things together based on things that you’re interested in is a “very hard technical problem,” according to Zuckerberg.Graph Search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, rather than links that might provide the answer.” For example, you could ask Graph Search “Who are my friends that live in San Francisco?” Zuckerberg joked that a difference is “filters,” which grabbed a few chuckles.
It's currently available to only a small number of Facebook users. It lets them search their friend lists for people who, for instance, live in a particular city or like a particular movie.There are no ads right now with the service, but Facebook may soon begin placing them there, analysts believe, since the searches provide an opportunity to catch users when they're looking for somewhere to spend money. Today, Facebook uses mostly "display" ads, keyed to the viewer's interests but not their searches."We believe this could be Facebook's next billion dollar opportunity, greatly expanding the company's addressable market," said Youssef Squali at Cantor Fitzgerald. "This service will leverage the incredible amount of unstructured social data the company has to extract answers to questions about people, photos, places, and interests."
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