Facebook Revealed Its Mystery And Presented "Graph Search" A New Search Engine

Ever since we read about a new search engine by Facebook back on September, and which their engineers had been working on we were quite intrigued. It wasn't until early this week that Facebook revealed its mystery and presented "Graph Search" a new search engine.

But what exactly is Facebook Graph Search? 
Facebook's new 'Graph Search is a search engine which works in the 'exploration of new connections'. For example, one can be able to contact an unknown person taking only as a reference a mutual friend or a party picture.

It relies heavily on “Likes” and other connections to determine what to show as the most relevant search results for each user. It also offers what you might think of as search filters — the ability to search based on the vast user data that Facebook has in its system (or “graph,” as they like to say).

Graph Search and web search are very different. 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. We believe they have very different uses.

For now, Facebook Graph Search will only include people, photos, places and interests — posts and other interests (like song listens) are in the works.

 Search results will be personalized, although Facebook says that more generic queries should produce fairly common results for most people. And Facebook has stressed that search results won’t reveal anything that was previously kept private; you’ll only be able to search for content that’s been shared with you.
Facebook Graph Search will be more valuable to active Facebook users — those who’ve actively Liked businesses and pages, artists and movies, and so forth.
 
As you can see, it's a cool way to search Facebook that takes advantage of the fact that Facebook is a big structured database. And if you're looking for pictures that people have uploaded to Facebook (and made public), or friends who went to a particular school or live in a particular place, or potential mates, it seems quite useful.

The service is in beta now, with only a few hundred people gaining access Tuesday. Facebook will be using results from those initial users to help tweak the service, before it pushes it out to the whole of the Facebook community.

Watch the video above and tell us what sorts of searches would you like to be able to do on Facebook? Let us know in the comments.

Related Post: Here's All You Need To Know About Search Graph