Facebook announced yesterday that it will be releasing it’s own search engine called Graph Search. You can apply for beta as of right now, and also click HERE if you want to see some examples and learn how they built it. Here’s the basic rub, the new search engine will dig through your tagged photos, hobbies, likes, comments and profile information to provide other Facebook users ideas of the types of people they may want to associate with. It will also search to find more general items like “what restaurant are my friends eating at most”, or the standard example “what’s a restaurant in London that my friends have eaten at?”. The key to Graph is that Google and other search engines do not have access to this library of data.
Will this really hurt Google
Not a chance, it will give people better access to the information within Facebook and ways to access all the data they’re tagged in. But if we’re calling the Internet reliable for all answers, I’m sure that your friends won’t have the answer to every question you have ever asked… Will it make Facebook more useable? Absolutely.
What effect does this have on my privacy?:
It seems to me that the total loss of privacy only occurs when you mark something public. If you keep your information private, and regulate it however you have been then you’ll be fine. For example I can search “people who live in my city” and it will pull up everyone who lives in my city with public profiles, not simply everyone. What I’m trying to say is simply if you know how to control your privacy on Facebook now, you’ll be just fine when Graph Search launches, if you don’t you may wanna learn.
A video:
Here is the launch video for Graph, this is a great addition for die hard Facebook users and for advertisers. If you fail at Facebook (much like me), you probably won’t notice a difference.