Users
who may have grown frustrated with Facebook's rudimentary search feature are
getting an updated version designed to make it easier to find people, places
and photos on the site.
Facebook
unveiled its social search tool in January but only made it available to a
small fraction of its 1.1 billion users, as its engineers continued to tweak
and test it. Over the next few weeks, starting on Monday, the company is
rolling out the social search tool, called "Graph Search," to
everyone whose language is set to U.S. English.
Unlike
searches on Google, which are good for finding specific things, Facebook's tool
is useful in unearthing information about your social circles. Graph Search
lets you find friends who live in San Francisco who are vegan. Friends of
friends who live near you and like hiking. Photos of your boyfriend taken
before you met him in 2010. Nearby restaurants that your friends like - and so
on.
But
soon after Facebook launched the tool, the Internet had a field day with less
innocuous and more embarrassing queries, showing just how much information
people reveal about themselves on the site, intentionally or not. Care to find
out which brand of condoms your friends prefer? Graph Search might tell you.
A
blog called ‘actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com’ posted a collection of
searches ranging from "married people who like prostitutes" to
"current employers of people who like racism." Both yielded more than
100 people.
While
it is possible that some of those Facebook users are fully aware that what
they've shared is easily searchable, it is likely that some are not. It's easy
to click "like" on a page and forget about it.To
avoid any unpleasantness, Facebook plans to notify users that it's "getting
easier for people to find photos and other things you've shared with them"
along with a reminder that they can check "who can see my stuff"
under their privacy settings."The
goal is to avoid bad surprises," said Nicky Jackson Colaco, privacy and
safety manager at Facebook. But she stressed Facebook's view that the search
tool "indexes information differently than we have ever been able to do
before, in a really positive way."
Facebook
does not currently show users ads based on what they are searching for, but the
company may do in the future. As Google has shown, it's a lucrative business.
Research firm eMarketer estimates that Google will take nearly 42 percent of
all U.S. digital ad spending this year, well above Facebook's share of less
than 7 percent.
With
its new search tool, Facebook is clearly trying to divert traffic and ad
spending from its rival.
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