It was probably a long time coming and slightly predictable, but Facebook finally rolled out, in my opinion, its ‘weapon’ against the mighty search engine of Google: Graph Search. What are its implications to you as a user or to you as a brand or organization?
Graph Search – Opening up a New World for Facebook?
The way I see it – and after a quick test on beta – this is potentially Facebook’s biggest (double-edged) sword so far.
How does Graph Search Work?
Simply put, when searching for phrases on the search bar, Facebook pulls up unique and highly personalized results for you based not just on your historical information but also on what it thinks are results you may like based on your social activities. Facebook basically shows you a search result based as near as it can on “social proof” and social connections.
Example: You know you probably have friends in the same city – Graph Search pulls out this information for you (as it did in the beta test for me).
A Can of Worms
Integrating search into a social networking platform immediately puzzled me. “There’s Google for that!” I (perhaps) too quickly said. This argument holds water – Google is a giant, especially in the battlefield it has dominated for years, search. I know for a fact that I’m not on Facebook to search for things. I log on to update my friends, chat with them, or visit pages I like or manage. While social recommendation on search is a good example of “proof”, this eliminates the thus-far successful model of Google search – socially unbiased results.
There’s the privacy issue as well. Graph Search unearths results from people who have shared content with you – whether you’re still friends with them or not. Much remains to be seen, but it may be high time to be more stringent with our privacy settings.
A Game Changer
Search on a social networking site may prove to be a powerful referral tool. From how it works, it seems to be best for businesses or organizations with actual physical locations – think restaurants, auto-repair shops, and Laundromats. It never hurts to have search results previously validated by friends’ testimonials to come up in your own unique results page.
Should this take off and acquire the critical user mass needed for a feature to be retained, Graph Search has the potential to make Facebook a “one-stop-shop” platform. One no longer needs to go out of Facebook when looking for information, provided one doesn’t need impartial search results.
An Uncertain Future
Personally, this looks like another money-making ploy from Facebook to my eyes (yes, sponsored stories can be made to appear higher in search results) and is probably useless or even fatal for business pages which do not work on social testimonials. Still, I will not discount the fact that it’s a new feature that Google or even Bing should watch carefully – a billion users isn’t a small number by any count.
I believe it’s not going to be able to challenge Google in search any time soon.
In addition, I believe that this further emphasizes social engagement and increasing one’s networks, meaning numbers. It’s only logical that since your Graph Search results are determined by your social connections, it will pay to both have more connections and more quality (maybe same interest?) connections.
At the end of the day, will you prefer social-based results from Graph Search or impartial search results from the likes of Google?
Do let me know what you think of Facebook’s Graph Search! Like and Share this article if you enjoyed it!
Featured image from Tech Crunch, retrieved on January 16, 2012.
About Jason Cruz
