Social networking juggernaut Facebook yesterday revealed a new search tool for its platform, upping the ante in its rivalry with Google and marking its most significant step into the search space to date.
The lines between social media and search have become increasingly blurred in recent years, as even Google has begun to grow its own social network, Google+, in an effort to add a social layer to all of its services, and offer more personalised content and search results.
Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg spoke at a press event held at Facebook's headquarters and was keen to emphasise that Facebook's new "Graph Search" is very different to traditional Web search.
"Graph Search is designed to take a precise query and return to you the answer, not links to other places where you might get the answer," said Zuckerberg.
Graph Search is Facebook's first big product to be released after the company's IPO in May last year, and is currently only available as a limited beta trial.
Facebook has reiterated that Graph Search is still in the early stages of development and will change as users begin to engage with it. Zuckerberg added it will take "years" for the search tool to be fully built out. The search engine currently covers four main areas -- people, photos, places, and interests.
"I don't necessarily think that a lot of people are going to start coming to Facebook to do Web search because of this, that isn't the intent. But in the event that you can't find what you're looking for, it's really nice to have."
Business opportunity
While Graph Search currently does not include any advertising, when asked about the possible monetisation opportunities in the new product, Zuckerberg said the quality of the user experience was the top priority for now, but added: "This could potentially be a business over time."
To date, Facebook has only tentatively introduced sponsored search ads to its existing search feature, where apps or pages can pay to show up in the search results for searches using the names of their competitors. Zuckerberg hinted the same principle could be extended to Graph Search and taken further with the inclusion of sponsored related results.
Facebook entered into a partnership with Bing in 2008, and Bing powers the Web search results within Facebook's internal search. Following yesterday's announcement, Bing posted a statement about Graph Search, saying: "As part of this product, our two engineering teams worked together to advance a unified search experience. That means that when people want to search beyond Facebook, they see Web search results from Bing with social context and additional information such as Facebook pages.
"To the Facebook user, they will not only see useful results, but we think we have serendipitous experiences. Imagine searching for Jay-Z concerts on Facebook, and not only finding Facebook content, but also Web results from Bing, including concert tickets, news about the tour and other Web results ? annotated with Facebook Likes and Shares. We think this is a powerful combination," says Bing, adding that the Web search results page on Facebook will feature a two-column layout.
Bing Web results will appear on the left-hand side, overlaid with social information such as likes, while content from Facebook pages and apps will appear on the right-hand side. When using Graph Search, if a query is better answered by Web search, Facebook displays the Bing results page. This is something which could also earn more money for Facebook as the social network earns a cut of the revenue from sponsored search ads (which will get more impressions thanks to the increased traffic).
Mining data
Facebook says search results in Graph Search will be ranked according to various "signals", such as likes, comments and personal connections, which will be used to define relevance. The search engine has also been created to recognise natural language rather than keywords in order to make it more intuitive. Facebook says the potential use cases can extend to recruitment and online dating.
Searches can be refined by multiple criteria, so for example a search for a local restaurant could be narrowed down to show results that include restaurants in a particular area that have been visited or rated by close friends or friends that just live in the area and so on. People searches can be refined by gender, age, location or even type of friendship, among other categories.
Addressing concerns over privacy, Zuckerberg said all existing privacy settings will be upheld within the new search engine - with users only being able to search content that is available to them on the network. Privacy changes are also said to be instantly reflected in the search engine.
Reuters quotes Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia as saying Facebook's search product was inevitable: "We think this will enable them to expand beyond display ads and ultimately compete with Google."
According to Facebook, with its one billion users, 240 billion photos and a trillion connections, its "social graph" offers a wealth of information that Graph Search will help users to tap into and make use of.
Gartner analyst Ray Valdes has, however, expressed some doubts over just how much useful information there is on the network: "Very well-connected individuals have a rich treasure trove of data they can mine, but the average person's storehouse of data is much sparser and has less relevance to these queries."
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