Facebook is offering its social search tool to more users, following a beta test earlier this year, as the social network looks to make its vast archive of user data more useful to users and advertisers alike. The new version of the ‘Graph Search’ feature has been updated to make it easier to find people, […]
Facebook is offering its social search tool to more users, following a beta test earlier this year, as the social network looks to make its vast archive of user data more useful to users and advertisers alike.
The new version of the ‘Graph Search’ feature has been updated to make it easier to find people, places and photos on the site.
Facebook unveiled its social search tool in January but only made it available to a small fraction of its 1.1 billion users, as its engineers continued to tweak and test it.
Over the next few weeks, starting on Monday, the company is rolling out the social search tool, called “Graph Search,” to everyone whose language is set to US English.
Unlike searches on Google, which are good for finding specific things, Facebook’s tool is useful in unearthing information about your social circles.
For example, if a user searches for “Photos of San Francisco,” they’ll see photos that friends took there and shared with them, as well as Public photos. This means if someone else does the same search, they’re going to see different results because they have different friends, and different photos have been shared with them.
The tool has attracted a share of controversy, in its ability to unearth mistaken or out-of-date status updates and find people based on potentially embarrassing criteria.
A blog called actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com
http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com/
posted a collection of searches ranging from “married people who like prostitutes” to “current employers of people who like racism.” Both yielded more than 100 people.
To privacy complaints, Facebook plans to notify users that it’s “getting easier for people to find photos and other things you’ve shared with them” along with a reminder that they can check “who can see my stuff” under their privacy settings.
Speaking to ABC News, Nicky Jackson Colaco, privacy and safety manager at Facebook said: “The goal is to avoid bad surprises. Graph Search indexes information differently than we have ever been able to do before, in a really positive way.”
Facebook does not currently show users ads based on what they are searching for, but the company may do in the future. However, research firm eMarketer estimates that Google will take nearly 42 per cent of all US digital ad spending this year, well above Facebook’s share of less than 7 per cent.
Read the official announcement here
