Facebook Announces New Search Engine

Facebook announced a new search engine called “Graph Search” at a much-anticipated press event at its Menlo Park headquarters this morning.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the search engine would leverage Facebook’s one billion members’ 240 billion photos, and 1 trillion interpersonal connections. Zuckerberg said Graph Search is designed to handle more precise queries than general web search, like “Who are my friends who live in San Francisco, my friends who live in Palo Alto, California and like Game of Thrones, and Mexican restaurants in Palo Alto, CA my friends have been to, and friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter?” As results come back, users can refine results using a control panel on the right side of the screen.

The search engine was developed by a team led by Lars Rasmussen, who co-created Google Maps and Google Wave, and by Tom Stocky, Facebook’s director of product management. (See WIRED’s exclusive look at the inside story of its development.) In a demonstration of the software, Stocky showed how Graph Search could be used for dating and matchmaking, typing the query “friends of friends who are single males in San Francisco California who are from India.” He also showed examples of searches recruiters might run, like “John Cumber’s friends who work at Google,” and “people who have been product managers and who have been founders.” Their official announcement is here.

Rasmussen, meanwhile, showed off photo oriented queries like “photos of my friends taken in national parks.” Graph Search also supports media queries like “videos by TV shows liked by my friends.”

Zuckerberg said Graph Search is now going into limited beta to a “very small number” of users and will be rolled out “very slowly” after that. “It’s an honor to be able to build this service and offer it to the world,” Zuckerberg says. “I don’t think people will start coming to Facebook to do web searches, but I think in time people will come to Facebook to do this [targeted queries] when they can’t find what they want.”

Zuckerberg summarized the search engine as “Giving people the tools to do the [data] cut they want and get the pictures they want. That’s the third pillar of search and we’re calling it Graph Search.”

To help users formulate queries, Graph Search offers a rich auto-complete system, along with what is called a “power bar” on the right-hand side of the page to refine search. “We wondered whether users would understand the natural language part,” Zuckerberg says. “But a lot of users are very trained from using web search for a decade… and that works in Graph Search.” At the same time, Graph Search rewrites ad-hoc queries to be more structured, training users how to enter future searches. “People learn very quickly to formulate queries,” Zuckerberg says. “So the feedback we’ve gotten is very positive.”

Marti Hearst, a professor specializing in search engines and information retrieval at the University of California, Berkeley, says Graph Search should prove useful for a narrow range of queries.

“This is a social awareness tool, rather than a general purpose search engine, and so I think will have more limited use than a search engine like Google or Bing,” she tells us. “There may be a ‘killer app’ usage for it, for instance, as a tool to find places your friends like when you visit an unfamiliar city.”

As for whether users will be able to adapt to Graph Search’s query language, Sullivan says “I really need to see how it works … auto-suggest can go a long way towards making long queries work well.”

Graph Search could be a hugely lucrative product for Facebook. Because people who run web searches are often close to making a purchase decision, advertisers are very eager to place ads next to search results. Close to 80 percent of Google’s billions in revenue is derived from this type of advertising.

Josh Elman, a former Facebook and Twitter product manager who is now a principal at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, thinks Facebook will be able “To monetize incredibly well,” on Graph Search. That will happen, he adds, “Once Facebook changes enough behavior to create intention for searching for recommendations and items that result in a purchase.

“When that happens they will be able to monetize incredibly well, but it takes searching for local business recommendations, product recommendations, etc., which people will have to switch over time to Facebook.”

For the moment, Facebook is not running ads on Graph Search. “This could potentially be a business over time, but right now we’re focused on building a good user experience,” Zuckerberg says.

Elman also thinks Graph Search will be adopted widely by Facebook users for certain use cases. “It’s pretty incredible,” he says. “We are just at the tip of the iceberg of the potential ways you can tap the information stored in your network… To help service existing FB queries for people this will get adopted quickly. Looking for friends in a given city, for friends with recent updates or photos, etc.

“But I think it will take time to have people with intent look to Facebook for new queries like ‘I’m hungry, what are good restaurants?’ or ‘What movie should I see?’ But I think over time, people will realize that asking friends is as easy as just querying this.

“I think we are just at the beginning of tapping the power of what Facebook has stored up in the graph of connections and content.”

Facebook executives at today’s event hastened to add that Graph Search will be “privacy aware,” a nod to widespread consumer concerns about how much information Facebook has compiled about its users and how extensive its privacy controls are. The only results Graph Search will turn are things you could already see on Facebook, and privacy changes to content are instantly reflected in search.

Tech writers have packed a Facebook auditorium for the event, having descended on the social network’s Menlo Park, California campus to “come and see what we’re building,” as Facebook’s invitation put it, ensuring a flurry of coverage.

Wall Street had been expecting a lucrative new product, judging from the recent spike in the price of Facebook stock, which last week rose 9 percent to a new six-month high above $30.

Facebook did a masterful, almost Apple-esque job of subtly hyping the event, sending out mysteriously worded e-mail invitations to tech journalists during the Consumer Electronics Show, just at the moment those journalists were starting to grow bored with the Las Vegas gadget bonanza. This led to a flurry of speculation and publicity.

We’re live in the scrum at Facebook HQ and will continue updating this post as the event unfolds, so check back for the news and our analysis.

Facebook’s Bold, Compelling and Scary Engine of Discovery: The Inside Story of Graph Search

Beast had a birthday last week. The First Dog of social networking — live-in companion to Mark Zuckerberg and his bride, Priscilla Chan — turned two. The proud owners baked a cake for the Hungarian sheepdog and decided to throw an impromptu party. Naturally, when it came time to compile the guest list, the couple turned to Facebook, the $67 billion company that Zuckerberg founded in his dorm room nine years ago.

To date, sorting through your Facebook friends could be a frustrating task. Although the site has a search bar, there has been no easy way to quickly cull contacts based on specific criteria. But Zuckerberg was testing a major new feature that Facebook would announce on Jan. 15 — one that promises to transform its user experience, threaten its competitors, and torment privacy activists. It’s called Graph Search, and it will eventually allow a billion people to dive into the vast trove of stored information about them and their network of friends. In Zuckerberg’s case, it allowed him to type “Friends of Priscilla and me who live around Palo Alto” and promptly receive a list of potential celebrants. “We invited five people over who were obvious dog lovers,” he says.

For years now, Facebook watchers have wondered when the company would unleash the potential of itsunderpowered search bar. (Nobody has feared this day more than Google, which suddenly faces a competitor able to index tons of data that Google’s own search engine can’t access.) They have also wondered how a Facebook search product might work. Now we know. Graph Search is fundamentally different from web search. Instead of a Google-like effort to help users find answers from a stitched-together corpus of all the world’s information, Facebook is helping them tap its vast, monolithic database to make better use of their “social graph,” the term Zuckerberg uses to describe the network of one’s relationships with friends, acquaintances, favorite celebrities, and preferred brands.

In the weeks leading up to the launch, Facebook executives were still trying to come up with a name for the new product. They were hoping to stay away from the word “search,” to distinguish it from web search. (Only a few days before the launch, one Facebook executive slipped and referred to it as “browse.”) But after hours of contortionism, they relented; nothing topped Graph Search. “It’s descriptive — it’s search,” Zuckerberg says. “And the graph is a big thing.” The idea is that Facebook’s new offering will be able to extract meaning from the social graph in much the same way that Google’s original search unearthed the hidden treasures of the web. “People use search engines to answer questions,” Zuckerberg says. “But we can answer a set of questions that no one else can really answer. All those other services are indexing primarily public information, and stuff in Facebook isn’t out there in the world — it’s stuff that people share. There’s no real way to cut through the contents of what people are sharing, to fulfill big human needs about discovery, to find people you wouldn’t otherwise be connected with. And we thought we should do something about that. We’re the only service in the world that can do that.”

The result is surprisingly compelling. The mark of a transformative product is that it gets you to do more of something that you wouldn’t think to do on your own. Thanks to Graph Search, people will almost certainly use Facebook in entirely new ways: to seek out dates, recruit for job openings, find buddies to go out with on short notice, and look for new restaurants and other businesses. Most strikingly, it expands Facebook’s core mission — not just obsessively connecting users with people they already know, but becoming a vehicle of discovery.

Zuckerberg says that this is in fact a return to the company’s roots. “When I first made Facebook, we actually offered some functionality that was like this but only for your college,” he says. “Facebook then was arguably as much for meeting new people around you and exploring your community as it was for keeping in touch with the people you already knew. But it was such a hard problem to do it for more than a few thousand people at a time. We transitioned from connecting with whoever you wanted to primarily staying with people you already knew. But Graph Search is like the grown-up version of that discovery aspect. Exploring your community is a core human need, and this is the first big step we’re taking in that direction.”

The first of many steps, that is. Graph Search will be improved based on how people actually use it. So Facebook plans a slow introduction, limiting the initial rollout to a small number of users. Zuckerberg’s expectation is that by the time it becomes available to millions it will be considerably improved.

For example, he thinks he can make it easier to find invitees for a canine birthday party. “We don’t have the ‘who has dogs’ field yet,” Zuckerberg says.