Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg treated the world to a sneak peek at the work his firm has been doing to overhaul the way people search for information on the site last night.
During a launch event in California,Zuckerberg showed off a beta version of the site’s new Graph Search service, which will draw on the masses of data people post on the site to give users more personalised search results.
The service will expand Facebook's existing search capabilities – which let members search for people, places and fan pages – by allowing them to submit strings of queries that can be used to delve deeper into their friends' interests, photos and checked-in places.
Members can use the tool to find photos from a specific date, search for connections who like the same films as them or scour the site for friends of friends that could be single, for example.
There’s more content that we haven’t got to yet than we have.
The capability will be rolled out to “hundreds of thousands” of the firm’s one billion users during the beta testing phase, which kicked off yesterday, and will initially focus on returning results relating to people, places, interests and photos.
What it means for Google
Zuckerberg was keen to stress that Graph Search was not the same as web search, and that he didn’t expect people to start coming to Facebook to use it in that way.
Any queries Graph Search cannot answer will be handed over to Microsoft’s Bing search engine to deal with.
As time goes on, Zuckerberg’s plan is to include people’s posts, but – as he points out – that will take time to come off because of the vast amounts of data Facebook’s developers will have to sift through first.
“It will take years to index the whole map of [all our users’ data]. There’s more content that we haven’t got to yet than we have,” he said.
At the moment, there’s no firm roll out date for the service. But, when it does eventually drop, it has the potential to seriously shake up the search market, and could benefit business users in several ways, too.
This may have been an attempt by the CEO to dampen down pre-event speculation that Facebook was planning to launch a standalone search engine that would directly pit it against Google.
But, thanks to Facebook’s technology tie-up with Bing, it’s a scenario that has the potential to play out in this way, despite Zuckerberg’s protestations.
“That isn't the intent...But [if] you can't find what you're looking for, it's really nice to have [Bing]," he said.
For Google, the launch of Graph Search could be far more disruptive to its business than it first appears.
If Facebook users type in a string, such as “Find restaurants where my friends eat in London”, they’ll be presented with a list of places their connections have recently checked-in at and recommended.
A similar search on Google would generate a list of London restaurants, but – unless they’ve eaten there before or heard good things from a friend or colleague – users will be flying blind.
Given the value people place in the recommendations of friends, users may – over time – become more inclined to rely on a Facebook search to find things to do than a Google one. Especially if it means they don’t have to leave the site.
This could be a troubling development for Google, which has been striving to provide users of its Google+ social networking site with a more personalised web search experience for some time.
What Google has in its favour is that it already has the information (and possibly the algorithms) needed to deliver this, but the Google+ user base is nowhere near as large as Facebook’s.
One way Google could make Graph Search work for it is by teaming up with Facebook in the same way Microsoft has. This is an idea Zuckerberg has entertained, but he suggested the firm couldn't agree on privacy terms with the web giant.
“I’d love to work with Google...[because] we want to make search social [and more open] in general," he added.
What it means for Microsoft
There’s no denying that Facebook’s partnership with Bing could be the shot in the arm Microsoft’s search engine needs, as it has trailed behind Google and Yahoo since its launch.
According to data from internet market analyst NetMarketShare, Google currently holds more than 83 per cent of the global search engine market for desktop devices. Yahoo is in second place with a shade over 8 per cent, while Bing is third with 4.6 per cent.
I'd love to work with Google.
On top of this, a report on US news site Daily Caller recently claimed that Microsoft is losing $2billion a year on Bing. The Facebook connection could help the firm staunch some of these losses by sending more traffic Bing's way.
This all largely depends on how long the Facebook-Microsoft partnership is forecast to last for and if the site never does manage to resolve its apparent privacy issues with Google.
At last night’s event, it wasn’t made explicitly clear if Facebook plans to make Bing a permanent part of its search service or rely on it to plug the gaps until it has the data needed to do that itself.
If it is a relatively short-term thing, it certainly won’t do the Bing brand any harm to be closely associated with the world’s largest social networking site. It could also provide it with a stay of execution, because there’s only so long any company can afford to support a business that’s supposedly not making much money.
If Facebook is planning to make Bing a permanent fixture (and users take to Graph Search in the way Zuckerberg obviously hopes they will), this could be very good news for the search engine and, at the very least, help it make a dent in Yahoo’s market share.
As for Google, the internet giant is unlikely to roll over and let Facebook encroach too much on its territory, and the site will undoubtedly remain the default search choice for most web users for a long time to come.
What will be interesting to see is, if Google does lose some share to this Facebook-Bing venture, if this might prompt the firm to come round to the social networking site’s way of thinking on privacy.
What it means for Businesses
Graph Search’s potential as a staff recruitment tool was demonstrated by Facebook’s Tom Stocky, who said people could use it to search through their friends’ networks for people who may have worked in particular industries or at certain firms.
Users could then approach their friends for more information about said person's character and suitability for a potential role, he said.
You can only see content on Graph Search that was already on Facebook before.
Whether or not people will use Graph Search in this way is anyone’s guess. Many Facebook users tend to keep details about their work life off the site or use online resources such as LinkedIn to trumpet their professional achievements.
Where it might come in more useful for businesses is in building brand awareness, as corporations with a Facebook page stand a better chance of appearing within people’s Graph Searches if they provide somewhere for people to check-in at and Like.
Graph Search could also provide businesses with an easy way of gauging the popularity of the services they offer and find out more about the wider interests of people who like their brand.
This was demonstrated last night when a search asking what music people who support Mitt Romney like was compared to a similar one investigating the musical tastes of Barack Obama fans.
Information like this could be used to hone products or market them differently, but the success and accuracy of this depends on how many Facebook users are willing to share this kind of information, and how many friends they have.
As Lars Rasmussen, director of product development at Facebook, pointed out last night. "You can only see the content [in Graph Search] you could already see on Facebook before."
Therefore, any photos, posts or interests uses have set to private will not be included in Graph Search's results.
Zuckerberg explained that Facebook has gone to great lengths to make it easier for users to hide information they don’t want shared by introducing features, for example, that let people untag multiple items at once rather.
Ahead of the service being rolled out to users, the site will also feature a prompt on its homepage urging members to review the information they share so they can sweep anything incriminating under a virtual carpet.
This is all part of the firm’s ultimate aim to roll out a search service that was “privacy aware,” explained Zuckerberg.
“Each piece of content has a different person who can see it [and] most of the things people share with you aren’t public, so you want a search tool that lets you get access to things people have just shared with you,” he added.
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