Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken to the stage at their California headquarters and announced 'Graph Search.'  Forming an indirect, social-based competition to Google, it is "a completely new way for people to find information on Facebook."

This is not a web search product similar to Google. 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. 

Filtering these searches will be something alike a more advanced tagging system, which goes through personal items (connection, relationship, interests and location) to build a socially relevent set of search results based upon parameters.  Ordinary searches will be dealt by Bing through the same search bar at the top, making for a strong presence from Facebook in taking on the Search giant.

Through this new search integration, Facebook is relying on the vast wealth of social connections to deliver results right for each individual user, firstly presenting results that the specific user and friends interact with the most, followed by mutal friends and engagement.  The first version will focus on four particular areas: People (“friends who live in my city”), Photos (“photos of my friends before 1999”), Places ("countries my friends have visited"), and Interests ("movies liked by people who are film directors").

In respects to privacy, Facebook say this is kept as a priority in the search: "It makes finding new things much easier, but you can only see what you could already view elsewhere on Facebook."  Whatever settings you have for what content is shared with which group of people, be it just you or to friends, it will afffect search results and take you out of any public searches for a query. 

Looking forward to this new search?  Think it'll bare any competition to Google?  Only time will tell.

Source: Facebook

Jason England