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Facebook Unveils Graph Search

In a press conference at its California headquarters, Facebook has unveiled “Graph Search,” a search engine allowing users to search for content on Facebook such as news posts, status updates, photos, locations and more. The service does make sense for the network massive base of 1 billion users, 240 billion photos, and 1 trillion connections. Graph Search is currently in closed beta.

“Graph Search will appear as a bigger search bar at the top of each page, when you search for something, that search not only determines the set of results you get, but also serves as a title for the page. You can edit the title – and in doing so create your own custom view of the content you and your friends have shared on Facebook.”

“Graph Search and web search are very different. 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.”

Users can sign up for the Graph Search beta on Facebook’s website.