By: iPadfanzz staff on January 16, 2013
Facebook has announced a 'graph search' tool that allows you to find things based on relationships and context—basically drawing from the limitless pool of Likes, tags, and check-ins posted by a billion Facebook members.
Marking the company’s biggest search into online search, Facebook has launched a powerful tool, that makes search personally relevant. It allows you to search based on people, places, friends, and interests. For instance, you can search, “New York restaurants my friends have visited nearby.” The search facility will expand further to cover all content.
The product launch, which is the most significant since the company's IPO last May, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described it as the site's "third pillar", after Timeline and News Feed.
"Graph Search is a really big project. Eventually... we want to index all the posts and all of the content on Facebook. I thought it couldn't be done. This is just some really neat stuff. This is one of the coolest things we've done in a while," Zuckerberg said in a statement.
He said the search engine facility will give you precise results, and will not link to other places that might not take you to the answer.
The service defaults to the web search engine Bing, which is run by Google's rival Microsoft.
Analysts expect the new facility to profitable for Facebook in terms of revenues as the launch is estimated to add $500 million in annual revenues if it can generate jut one paid click per user per year.
Given that the overall growth in total Facebook has slowed significantly, such a feature will prove to be quite useful to the existing users.
However, the success of the graph search will rely primarily on local information and will depend on the social network launching a mobile product.
At the same time, most of the analysts agree that the search tool is unlikely to challenge Google's dominance in web search at least in the near term.
Facebook has announced a 'graph search' tool that allows you to find things based on relationships and context—basically drawing from the limitless pool of Likes, tags, and check-ins posted by a billion Facebook members.
Marking the company’s biggest search into online search, Facebook has launched a powerful tool, that makes search personally relevant. It allows you to search based on people, places, friends, and interests. For instance, you can search, “New York restaurants my friends have visited nearby.” The search facility will expand further to cover all content.
The product launch, which is the most significant since the company's IPO last May, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described it as the site's "third pillar", after Timeline and News Feed.
"Graph Search is a really big project. Eventually... we want to index all the posts and all of the content on Facebook. I thought it couldn't be done. This is just some really neat stuff. This is one of the coolest things we've done in a while," Zuckerberg said in a statement.
He said the search engine facility will give you precise results, and will not link to other places that might not take you to the answer.
The service defaults to the web search engine Bing, which is run by Google's rival Microsoft.
Analysts expect the new facility to profitable for Facebook in terms of revenues as the launch is estimated to add $500 million in annual revenues if it can generate jut one paid click per user per year.
Given that the overall growth in total Facebook has slowed significantly, such a feature will prove to be quite useful to the existing users.
However, the success of the graph search will rely primarily on local information and will depend on the social network launching a mobile product.
At the same time, most of the analysts agree that the search tool is unlikely to challenge Google's dominance in web search at least in the near term.
