Sunday 27 January 2013

Facebook Graph Search

As Facebook continues to roll out its new feature, more and more users are getting their hands on this new search tool. Facebook's stalking would now be limited only by user's creativity with search queries and how how they use this feature. Many people are scared by the thought that there stuff would go public. But it should be very clear that no private information is exposed by graph search. People are already sharing stuff on Facebook. Its just that it is now easily accessible. Lets say we want to search for the people who like cricket. One could have easily visited pages related to cricket and look at the people who liked those pages. With the introduction of graph search, we don't have to do this extra effort. We can just search. So, graph search only searches the information which is public. It does not breach the privacy of a person.I am trying to overstate that anyone who has a Facebook account and has not locked down his or her privacy settings is ignorant.  Here is what Facebook says :
"With Graph Search, you can look up anything shared with you on Facebook, and others can find stuff you've shared with them, including content set to Public. That means different people see different results."

Facebook's new Graph Search feature owes part of it thanks to Bing. Facebook and Microsoft have worked together for a number of years now with Microsoft investing $240 million in Facebook back in 2007. Now when users search for people, places and things using Facebook's search bar, the results would be shown alongside web results courtesy of Bing.

Of course, the same was the case when Google came and we had to learn to adjust to the fact that "internet never forgets" - the information that you posted online years ago can come back to haunt you. But Facebook has taken that to new level of intimacy because much of the stuff here seems so ephemeral : a like, a follow - things that you might not even remember doing.

Google is looking on in jealously, comparing the number of Google+ users to Facebook's gargantuan total and shedding a few tears. The reigning champ of search engines, Google did its best to socialize search with Google+. But Bing managed to make searching more social by tapping into Facebook. No matter how much Google denies, but seeing how many of your friends "Like" something on the web still carries much more weight than a "+1".


Official Facebook Graph Search Introduction page : http://newsroom.fb.com/News/562/Introducing-Graph-Search-Beta


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