Facebook has announced the launch of the beta version of its new social search engine - Graph Search.
"When Facebook first launched, the main way most people used the site was to browse around, learn about people and make new connections. Graph Search takes us back to our roots and allows people to use the graph to make new connections," says Facebook.
Speaking at a special press event at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarter, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg emphasised that Graph Search is very different to Web search.
"We are not indexing the web. We are indexing our map of the graph, which is really big and constantly changing. Almost a million new people every day," said Zuckerberg, adding that there are 240 billion photos, one billion people and one trillion connections on Facebook.
"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."
Speaking of th technical challenge of building such a search function for the social network, Zuckerberg said: "The search we wanted to built is privacy aware. Every piece of content on Facebook has its own audience which makes Graph Search very challenging to build."
"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."
Facebook says it has also focused on keeping the search process as natural and intuitive as possible - moving away from keywords and allowing for the use of natural language.
Graph Search is still in the early stages of development and is currently only available in English (US) and only a subset of Facebook content is currently indexed by it. "Posts and Open Graph actions (for example, song listens) are not yet available. We'll be working on these things over the coming months," says Facebook.
The beta version of Graph Search focuses on people, photos, places and interests. Facebook users interested in being part of the limited beta trial can sign up to be on the waiting list here. The social network says rollout of the new feature will be slow "so we can see how people use Graph Search and make improvements".
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