

Introducing Graph Search - trendspotter
https://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch
"Graph Search is designed to show you the answer and not links to answers."
======
simonsarris
This is an important step for Facebook and I'm surprised no one has really
mentioned it (all ~50 comments so far are about the graph search).

The big thing here isn't graph search, or the fancy searching per se. The big
thing here is this:

> "and meet new people, too."

This is huge. Huge!

Facebook from the start was envisioned as a sort-of dating platform but that
part of it got swept under the rug real quick. Throughout Facebook's history
_meeting_ people with Facebook has been a slim thing. Typically it was always
one way:

Meet in real life -> Add on facebook.

It's only a matter of time until Facebook tries to make it the other way
around. It seems they're explicitly avoiding the "dating" route, which may or
may not be wise (dating sides have some weird connotations among some groups
of people). It looks like they've finally found their solution.

The amazing thing here isn't Graph. It's that Facebook is going to change its
paradigm so that meeting new people is a viable goal of going on Facebook.

So eventually we'll be meeting people through Facebook, starting with
meetup.com style interests. That's big.

~~~
Irregardless
> This is huge. Huge!

Quite the opposite, in my opinion. People don't like being bothered by
strangers on Facebook. It's weird and creepy, especially so when it's a guy
contacting a girl. This could be seen as a disincentive to share if you don't
want your face popping up on search results for people outside your immediate
network.

It also makes friends who are ignorant or careless about privacy more of a
liability. If they tag you in something that's set to 'public', that thing
could now be seen by far more strangers far more frequently. There's no good
solution to this: You can harrass your friends about their tagging habits,
waste countless hours un-tagging yourself every month, or delete your profile
altogether.

I could see it being useful if you could give it commands. Something like:
"Invite all friends who like Game of Thrones to my Game of Thrones Event on
Sunday at 8PM". Then again, that could just increase the amount of noise on
Facebook and drive people away even faster.

~~~
spindritf
> People don't like being bothered by strangers

People love being bothered by strangers. Just try it. Make any half-funny
observation about the world around you to a random stranger in the line, at
the hairdresser... just not when they're actively doing something. Weather the
surprise, repeat what you said if necessary, allow them to come up with a
response. If they don't, follow through yourself.

At first it seems like you're a crazy person talking at others. But after a
minute (though it'll feel like a little longer) most people will happily talk
to you.

And don't think of it as "bothering". You're diverting your precious attention
to them. The thing that every website and channel on the planet wants from
you.

That used to be just normal, polite behaviour BTW.

~~~
Angostura
> At first it seems like you're a crazy person talking at others. But after a
> minute (though it'll feel like a little longer) most people will happily
> talk to you.

Yes - but if you watch _very_ carefully you'll notice their eyes darting
nervously about, trying to find the nearest exit, and a small frown appear as
they attempt to calculate the whether staying in the line is worth it, and the
likelihood of you attempting to sell them something or attempt violence if you
make your excuses.

In other words - if some random guy starts talking to you in a line, you will
tend to make small-talk in return. Whether you like it or not.

~~~
StavrosK
That is not my experience at all. Sure, some people will feel uncomfortable,
but it shows right away, and I stop. Some people are more open and return the
joke, keep the conversation going, etc

That's always nice, for everyone involved (or so I like to think).

------
monkeyfacebag
Graph Search seems like strange branding to me. I almost didn't click the link
because I thought "Graph Search" was a new API and not a user-facing product
(to be fair, the context was a posting on HN so I was predisposed to think
API). Graph Search's real focus appears to be on the use of natural language
and the presentation of/interaction with data. The "Graph" is almost the least
interesting about it.

~~~
thechut
Is it called that because it is leveraging many feature from the OpenGraph
API? Could I accomplish similar things with the API?

~~~
andrethegiant
I think they chose the name as an homage to the name of how the data is
represented from an engineering standpoint. A graph is a data structure that
has many nodes connected together. In this case, a node is a person, photo,
location, etc, and the edges represent how they are related to each other.

------
juiceandjuice
So basically facebook is what facebook was 7 years ago when you could click on
a word in a profile and find out everyone else in your (college) network that
also had that listed.

I'm glad they brought back functionality they removed forever ago.

~~~
hresult
+1

------
togasystems
Crazy.. I developed a Facebook Graph search about a year ago using FQL
queries. It works very similarly to how Facebook implemented their Graph
Search. I even put a voice recognizer on top of it. Glad to know that my crazy
ideas aren't so crazy after all :)

Link to demo video:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=g...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ge1mH6xqSQc)

~~~
pmtarantino
Release it as open source and BOOM :D

~~~
togasystems
I might... It would need a big clean, but what personal project doesn't?

~~~
pmtarantino
Or not. Doesn't be ashame, it works great (or at least it seems to work
great). Meanwhile, upload to any server to give it a try. I really want to
test it, and I think it should receive more buzz ;)

------
gfodor
They're going to have the same problem wolfram alpha has, since in the space
of "all queries" only a tiny, tiny fraction of them are going to be ones that
Facebook can resolve. Now, it might be less of a practical problem since the
use cases for FB search are pretty clear and obvious, unlike W|A. But it
doesn't sound like this is an open-ended search engine. Imagine typing say
"shoes for sale on amazon" and getting "Sorry, Facebook doesn't know how to
answer this query." It will quickly pigeon hole the product.

Also, similar to W|A, there is value in the _queries themselves_ since they
are mini-algorithms. If someone comes up with a clever query to get FB to say,
find me people who I actually might want to hire, it could be valuable. I
really hope they build an API on top of this so that startups can build
products around novel queries.

~~~
dgregd
> tiny fraction of them are going to be ones that Facebook can resolve

maybe the rest they are going to forward/proxy to Bing.

~~~
sonier
Interesting, I wonder how many people would start using this as there only
search engine.

~~~
mark_l_watson
That is FB's plan :-)

Not a bad idea. Perform a search, highest ranked results are for friend's
content, then fall through to Bing results. The Bing search API (from Azure
marketplace) which I use from Clojure and Ruby applications yields good
results and since Google no longer offers search APIs, Microsoft gets that
business.

~~~
fudged71
Exactly. The less people are reliant on Google, the less power the entire
Google+ model has to survive.

On year from now, trying to convince someone to use Google+: "But it's
accessible from the google homepage!" "I don't google anymore, I just search
facebook"

------
sek
1\. Weird marketing, the word "Graph" doesn't mean anything to average people.
Just call it "Facebook Search". Also these cold hyper emotional sounds kinda
turn me off, even Apple has more friendly ads. Did they steal the music from
some apocalyptic space movie trailer?

2\. Interesting problem, to make all that data available to natural search
queries. Definitely an attack on Google who still can't really answer natural
queries what Marissa Mayer was talking about ages ago.

3\. There is just stuff from Facebook what I think is problematic because
people don't share everything on Facebook. If they can expand it onto the
whole web, it would be a game changer, but also way more difficult to solve.

4\. I can't think of a query I would use this for other than testing it. If I
search for Apple, I want to the Apple website. So I think this is more a
solution on the search for a problem. Maybe they figure that out when it's out
there.

~~~
glomph
>The word "Grap" doesn't mean anything to average people.

You can say that again!

~~~
sek
I swear that was unintentional, fortunately I could still edit it XD

------
alaskamiller
This is pretty futuristic, it's SQL for non-techies that pulls from Facebook
data. The most inquisitive, but not enough to be a programmer and deal with
FQL and code, will find this really useful since they can finally make use of
all the objects they've acted upon and entities they've acted with.

It makes Facebook data actually... purposeful.

The next step is still to match purpose with intent to make that money.

~~~
businessleads
Our startup is very excited about this part, since we let people earn bounties
based on the intelligent connections they can make between people they know
and a business offering a particular service or deal. We are curious whether
it will be open enough for us to suggest or run searches for an authenticated
user to suggest who they should share a particular offer with.

~~~
alaskamiller
I don't doubt they open it to their platform but at the same time... remember
what happened to people playing on Microsoft's Windows platform in the
80's/90's. And from the scuttlebutt I've heard about dealing with FB execs,
they're much better at analyzing data, have clout, leverage, money, power,
traffic, so it's hard to deal.

~~~
businessleads
I would not recommend anyone pin their entire business model on this; but it
certainly comes at a nice time for some companies.

------
DannyBee
I guess i don't get why I should care.

I either have to unfriend people to get it to give me stuff i care about
(since it appears to have no way to explain i don't give a shit what my
grandma thinks about sushi in palo alto), or it's giving me answers that don't
seem better.

I understand they needed to improve their site/internal search, and this looks
great for that. But it just doesn't seem like that big a deal to me. What am i
missing?

~~~
joeblau
You're not missing anything... that's it. Facebook CEO rolls out search
feature.

While I do think that the feature is pretty interesting, I don't think it
warrants reporters flying in from all over the country to cover the event. I'd
be pretty upset right now if I flew in from a news organization NYC to cover
this.

~~~
xauronx
Oh man, I know. I would be furious. Now you have to somehow justify that $10k
trip by forcing yourself to make search sound cool and draw views. Now you
have to spend your time trying to figure out WHY this feature is worth anyone
caring about past a search for "What 18 year old females have recently gotten
out of a relationship?"

------
tambourine_man
Facebook is one of the few things in this 'ideologyless' world that really
makes my blood boil.

From the promo video:

    
    
      -The world feels smaller…
      Yes, I joined the freaking World Wide Web to narrow my world view.
      -On Facebook, when two people make the same search, they get completely different results!
      That's a feature?
    

People can't freaking decide where they wan't to eat or go to the movies for
themselves?

What's maddening to me is that we are allowing someone like Zuckerberg, who
obviously has many talents, but making friends is not one of them, direct our
social lives. The sad thing is that it's getting harder and harder to ignore
it, from work to friends. I fear that someday I might be forced to join this
freakshow.

------
phwd
I'm torn. On one side I really like it, it reminds me of the old People Search
feature Facebook used to have. On the other side for third party developers
especially those who try to make the Facebook experience better, I'm afraid
this is reinforcing the point you should not build 100% on platforms.

I'm sure there are many who have had this idea or are building this currently.
Facebook Heroku templates given for new developers to start with, hit on the
four main areas that Graph Search seem to provide.

Another example would be a query like

    
    
        movies liked by people who like movies I like
    

In FQL the closest I would have gotten was

    
    
       SELECT name, page_id from page where page_id in (SELECT page_id from page_fan where uid in (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = me()) and profile_section='movies')
    

And even then FQL was unstable

So then you wonder, why use an app with an unstable query built on an API
filled with bugs when I can faster get the result using facebook.com?

~~~
mutual_likes
I would be torn too if people used my app, but I like this. Building your own
app has it's limits. I built a facebook app to show mutual likes sorted by
likes because facebook's pages browser only showed mutual likes sorted by
friends. The FQL to do this is slow and unusable if someone has many hundreds
of friends and likes. Plus, some friends don't allow apps to query their data,
so the result is incomplete.

My feature request would be to allow us to create and share custom FQL and
views computed and rendered by facebook. Then, friends don't have to give
permission to apps to access their data and facebook runs the query faster.

------
karpathy
Imo, this is a very smart move if the execution lives up. It gives an
incentive to put up even more (structured) information to Facebook, such as
Likes/people tags/etc., because now there is a more permanent point to it: it
can be discovered by someone much later and become useful and interesting, as
opposed to it being interesting merely up to a day on the News Feed and then
disappearing forever somewhere deep in your timeline.

In other words, it makes building your profile feel additive and even useful.

~~~
notahacker
The marketing value of a Facebook like just soared.

I feel like a Luddite for it incentivising me to _remove_ stuff from a wall I
want to be a place for actually interested friends to check out my photos and
not a collection of metadata for marketers

~~~
taliesinb
Wouldn't it be neat if there was an "anonymous like" that you could use for
the benefit of your friends and yourself, but that would be prevented from
being revealed in a way that was traceable directly to you? I.e. differential
privacy for the facebook crowd.

For me, the potential negatives of leaving a very precise data shadow for
marketers and state actors to remember for all time often outweigh any
potential benefits, for a whole range of 'codify yourself' opportunities even
outside Facebook (e.g. GoodReads, Amazon Wishlist, YouTube subscriptions,
etc).

~~~
businessleads
"Anonymous like" #featuresyouwillnevereversee

------
minimaxir
My first Graph Search will be:

 _Find people on Facebook whose first name begins with Robert'); DROP TABLE
users;--_

~~~
joelthelion
Be careful. You might face 35 years in prison :-/

~~~
sergiotapia
Too soon, man; too soon.

------
tferris
This product doesn't make sense at all.

I can just query useless data from my peer group or the friends of friends
group. Data which I already know and not care about.

But I cannot ask the really interesting questions about all Facebook users:

"Show me all female singles nearby with at least 30 profile photos each"

"Show me all female singles nearby which love to chat and respond messages
within 2 hours on average."

"Show all females within one mile and poke them all automatically"

This thing is as it is half-baked: the name, the product, just everything --
far away from being "huge".

BTW, those kind of looking-for-female-singles-in-my-city-queries were very
easy in FB's early days for quite a long time. Then, I poked them all in my
city and got a conversion (poke2reply) of about 1:15.

~~~
RyanZAG
By that description, it sounds like Facebook did a good move in restricting
this, as well as removing the ability to do it awhile back.

Seriously, females are human too.

------
Irregardless
Great, now I have even more reason to stop tagging friends, like fewer things,
tighten my privacy restrictions, and tell friends to stop tagging me or
checking me in to places.

I have no interest in my personal info being used for their search engine, nor
do I want friends of friends (i.e. strangers) to contact me just because I
like the same TV show or went to their favorite restaurant.

~~~
andrewmunn
If you don't want friends of friends seeing stuff, why don't you just set your
privacy to friend's only?

~~~
Irregardless
You can't control your friends' privacy settings. If they tag you in something
and have their own privacy settings wide open, anyone will be able to see it.

~~~
bulltale
From what I recall you can stop friends from tagging you in photos on FB.

~~~
Leynos
You can make tag approval mandatory, but people can still tag you and you will
be bombarded with spam about that tag until you remove it.

------
aviswanathan
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet, but if you watch the video on the
bottom part of the page with Zuck, one of them explicitly says how this
product competes with Google. Something about how if two people search for
Apple on Google, they'll get the same results, but if they search Apple on FB
Graph Search, they'll get personalized results. It's really interesting from a
technology perspective the way that search is becoming personalized, and we've
definitely seen Google eyeballing search personalization, but it's been
limited pretty much to geo and the limited info on G+. Facebook is uniquely
positioned to use the volume of data on each person to provide more meaningful
results.

From a revenue perspective, I think this is definitely competitive to Google.
Not saying it will succeed, but businesses will definitely see value in
advertising to hyper-specific segments and personal groups. It sounds strange
to say, but I do think UI and speed will be key components of whether FB GS
will do well. Search is a convenience market, and if FB GS isn't convenient,
Google is always one click away.

~~~
jonknee
> one of them explicitly says how this product competes with Google. Something
> about how if two people search for Apple on Google, they'll get the same
> results, but if they search Apple on FB Graph Search, they'll get
> personalized results.

Except that's not true. Google personalizes results for users and also
sometime integrates social aspects (through Google+).

If I search for pizza I see a map of pizza places close to me, their average
reviews, links to find out more, photos, etc etc. I don't know if a Facebook
friend once at a slice there, but I also don't care whatsoever and would
rather not see it to be honest.

~~~
ry0ohki
>Google personalizes results for users and also sometime >integrates social
aspects

Right, except this doesn't actually work unless all of your friends work at
Google.

~~~
hresult
You don't have to use Google+ news stream if you want to get personalized
search results, if that's what you're trying to imply (by friends working at
Google). Search personalization is achievable by other means if necessary:
past searches, searching while logging in with Google account, YouTube
searches. Facebook is essentially trying to do the same, with much less
product spectrum and more desperation as it gets more boring and uncool.

------
plg
problems:

1\. it treats data from all friends (presumably) equally. Presumably in real
life you weigh opinions of different friends differently.

2\. search can only take place on information that your friends are willing to
share publicly (or at least with all their "friends"). Presumably in real life
opinions you get from people you know will be way different if they know it is
a private exchange.

3\. isn't this all a bit high on the autism spectrum? The idea that to find
out information about the likes and dislikes of your "friends", you log onto a
computer and do what amounts to a database search, rather than just ASK YOUR
FRIENDS ???

~~~
exodust
Good points.

With number 3, if you just ask your friends, there's no chance for advertisers
to get involved in that transaction. Facebook is a business where the things
you express to friends and family are the currency with which you pay for the
service.

"Free and always will be" is a lie when factoring in your personal views,
information, recommendations, and content are the currency used.

You can always leave FB, but you'll be losing connections you depend on for
emotional and social reasons. Facebook knows this, that's why they have you by
the balls.

As an outsider, I'm seeing a new wave of business-reliance on FB which will
mean the FB logo spreading to every shop, ad, website etc. From the local
bakery to bike shop, "Find us on Facebook" posters clumsily displayed in big
fat graphics. More than ever, I'm not interested in joining.

This new business-reliance will alienate those who joined to connect with
people.

Future generations hopefully won't tolerate such a blatant sellout of personal
connections, a stupid hi-jacking of the word "like" - which once belonged to
people who liked things.

Marketing and search engines don't belong as an invisible force underlying
your communications with close friends or family. That is so wrong it's
poisonous.

Zuckerberg said it best: "dumb f--ks".

------
not_that_noob
This is Facebook trying to become Google. +1 for ambition. But lousy product
and mostly meh. It's not a Google killer.

People go to Google to search for lots of stuff they want to know more about.
Movies, sports, homework, whatever. And when they need that particular
mouthwash, where do they think of first? Google. And thus the power of
AdWords. The habit of general searching causes you to turn to Google when
you're seeking a product.

Mark Z is smart, and recognizes this dynamic. So he's trying to create a
destination for your search queries. The problem for him is that people
already have a habit he needs to break. And what he's offering as an incentive
to break it is pretty weak tea. How often will the average user (grandma in
Peoria) turn to Graph Search? Not often enough to break her Google habit.

+1 for effort and ambition - but I doubt this is going to be much more than
hype.

------
shock-value
Some of the examples in the promo videos are pretty far-fetched. I mean, does
anyone really give Facebook any information about which dentist he or she goes
to? I've never even seen a post from someone talking about going to the
dentist, let alone including the dentist's actual name!

~~~
mjmahone17
No, but if lots of people who aren't associated with you have liked a specific
dentist, then that dentist would be top of the search for dentists in your
town.

One of the side effects of people actually using graphsearch would be that
businesses need to have more likes than their competitors, to enhance their FB
SEO. Therefore, we'll likely see even more FB ads for nearby businesses trying
to get you to like their page.

~~~
shock-value
You touch on a related point... ranking a business by number of likes is
pretty useless. Facebook is going to have to introduce some kind of point
rating system like Yelp or Netflix for this to be useful at all.

------
jonmc12
Interesting to compare against Path (they announced search on 12/20 -
<http://www.wired.com/business/2012/12/path-social-archive/>):

Path: search personal events; discovery via proximity (nearby)

Facebook: search graph events; discovery via common interest

Seems like facebook trying to hone in on cases like dating (discovering people
with common interests), and interest discovery (ie, restaurants that others
like). Path seems more about making most of personal time (creating life
events) in the context of a social environment.

~~~
NathanKP
It seems like Facebook graph search has a lot more functionality, or maybe I
just can't discover how to do everything that Path can do with search.

I did discover that it can do delightfully strange things like if you search
for "snow" it finds all the moments that happened when it was snowing, even if
the moment does not have the word "snow" in it. So it must link location and
weather history with moments, which is pretty cool!

So Path has a lot of potential. I think the search interface just needs some
work to expose more functionality like Facebook is.

------
hresult
Facebook's intent is really obvious - they are trying to replace "raw"
Internet with the Facebook layer, and people would do all interactions:
social, searches, shopping through their layer. This would render other
companies like Google, Yelp, you name it obsolete. The problem however is in
the details: how can anyone trust Facebook with their private data, searches
etc. considering all the privacy issues, lack of user's control over their
data, etc.? Once you're in the Matrix, you cannot unplug. That's what Facebook
is trying to bring to the users.

------
jblow
I don't understand why people think this is going to be useful.

The inbuilt assumption is that people care enough about the data to want to
search it frequently and thoroughly. I don't think that is true. Facebook is
mostly ephemeral junk data that you don't care about; this has been true ever
since they changed their UI to the Twitter-style "what are you thinking right
now?" input / streaming.

In order for search to be useful they first have to backtrack heavily on what
their entire platform is about. Which would be hard.

------
beatpanda
"Everyone on Facebook who isn't blocked by you can search for you, but what
they can see in search results about you depends on what's shared with them.

Search results respect your privacy settings, whether it's info you’ve shared,
or posts with tags of you that others have shared."

My Facebook profile is currently set to _not be visible in search_ , because I
don't want people who I didn't explicitly give my Facebook link to be able to
find me. Will Facebook continue to respect this setting?

------
jaimebuelta
Am I the only one that doesn't usually click on "like' things? I mean things
like 'dancing', 'outdoors' or 'Game Of Thrones'. Even if I like them. First,
because I don't think one day "hey, I like dancing, so I think I should state
it on Facebook so everyone knows!" And second, because most of the times,
liking something gets your timeline full of useless updates.

Not sure if is something that adds real value for users. We'll see...

~~~
karpathy
I was thinking the same things, but I just took about half hour to map out my
books/tvshows/movies/sports/activities and enter them all because they are now
potentially searchable. For example, if one of my friends also read a book I
liked, that's something I'd be happy to know.

~~~
jaimebuelta
Yes, but, do you think that is something that you'll keep doing? The main idea
is that Facebook keeps track of all that information, and you have to feed it.

It is possible that FB will "capture" status messages to add to that
information. E.g. saying something like "Great Game Of Thrones show today!"
will get converted into "like GoT", but it can be difficult, as there are a
lot of info that you don't usually comment on Facebook. How many books did you
read in your life? Are you listing them all in FB?

I think that anything that needs specific "maintenance" can be difficult to
keep up-to-date in the long run, and you'll end with people that liked a group
for a couple of years and got tired of, etc...

------
marknutter
Here's what Facebook doesn't get. I have 580 friends on Facebook. These are
all people I've met in real life at least once. I care, honestly, about maybe
50 of them. And of those I care about, I want to know what's going on in maybe
10 of those 50 friends' lives. Ask my how much I care about people who aren't
friends with me on Facebook. About as much as I care about anybody on the
internet on any site.

~~~
lesinski
Actually, that's what's great about Facebook: they probably already know who
those 10-50 friends are based on your activity on the site, your location,
your photos.

They know your best friends based on your actions versus who you might list if
they asked you who your best friends are -- which might be a more accurate way
of figuring it out anyway.

~~~
angryasian
yeah but out of those 50 you may only want 10 that are knowledgeable about
food, and in the greater 500 list you may want 10 that are knowledgeable about
tech. Just because you're close to someone doesn't you mean you value their
opinion as highly on every subject.

~~~
mturmon
Especially as you get older, and your friendships diversify.

------
taliesinb
This bears much more resemblance to Wolfram|Alpha than it does to Google
Search.

Glad to see natural language interfaces are finally going mainstream.

~~~
jaydz
The example queries remind me of Prolog.

~~~
taliesinb
Well, not in terms of syntax :).

No, I think they're probably doing proper natural language parsing, and from
there hand-coded translation to (their internal version of) FQL.

I wonder how flexible their grammar is. It'll be pretty easy to reverse
engineer the techniques they are using by looking at failure modes of parses
and how intelligently they correct fall-throughs.

------
pseut
So... it's either algorithmic stalking or it's nothing that new, right? I'm
going for algorithmic stalking. Now, to really be effective, I guess they're
going to have to add "graph alerts" so one can get notified when (totally
hypothetically), any friend of a friend living in the same city with more than
n friends (to screen out the losers; replace n with your own threshold)
changes her relationship status to "single". Or I guess one can just keep a
saved search/smart folder of "prospects" (stalkees?) that can be "checked in"
on from time to time; maybe set up a mobile alert that pings you whenever one
of them is in/near your neighborhood.

So, I can see why advertisers or businesses might like this, and I can see why
grudge-holding exes might like this, but I can't really see why I would want
to be stalked. Thank god Facebook has such transparent and persistent privacy
settings, or I'd really worry!

(yes, this is over the top)

------
seanlinehan
I may be being a bit of a braggadocio, but the 5-person startup I work for in
featured in their blog post announcing the product... pretty unexpected
coverage!

[http://www.facebook-studio.com/news/item/introducing-
graph-s...](http://www.facebook-studio.com/news/item/introducing-graph-search-
help-people-discover-your-business)

------
plg
Honest question: why would I want to ask Facebook a question about my friends,
when I can just ... ask my friends?

------
orangethirty
If only I could _buy_ a developer account so I did not have to be a Facebook
user to integrate with them.

------
priley
Pretty awesome that Facebook could pull this off so quickly. I literally said
that exact line to Lars (who lead the search team) during our meetings last
year... I can't believe he reused verbatim in the video:

"Facebook is for the all the people you know... Ark is for all the people you
should know".

~~~
viraj_shah
You're right, he does highlight the distinction between people you know and
people you _should_ know. I instantly thought of Ark when hearing about this.
I'd like to see how they and Ark might facilitate those connections once
you've identified them. If I'm traveling abroad and meet someone from the same
small town, I don't know how inclined I'll be to message them. Not to mention,
those messages in Facebook get lost in the "Others" section where I've heard
countless stories of people discovering important messages months later.

------
stevewilhelm
I voted up this article because I just wanted to read something technical on
HN.

------
rickymm3
would just like to point out:

Google started moving towards a more social experience from search engine by
adding google plus.

Facebook started move towards a search engine from social experience by adding
graph search.

They are definitely lined up to converge at a giant battleground, both coming
from opposite sides of the spectrum.

Both will come with different strengths, however, Google's integration of its
plus network is FAR superior, both technically, and in the sense of having a
plan. Whether we use it or not, it is already stealing data from us, even if
we dont know it.

IMO, google has no adversaries. FB is doing this for the fun of it.

------
mathattack
Wow. There are a lot of interpretations on why this is HUGE - a game changer.

In addition to what's been mentioned above, this is the shot across the bow of
Google. I suspect Google has better search, but their social graph is much
worse. (Google+ is only extensively used by their captive audience) The search
on Facebook will get better over time, and they have the better social graph.
This also gives them a new "neat" factor that will keep people coming back,
especially those bored of seeing cat and children photos from long forgotten
friends.

------
37prime
Yet another reason to abandon Facebook. It is getting creepy and creepier.

------
guptaneil
For a company that claims to understand the importance of mobile, why are the
videos still in Flash? There is absolutely no reason they couldn't have used
HTML5 with Flash fallback here.

~~~
jay_kyburz
I just watched them on an iPad. Perhaps it's The other way round?

~~~
guptaneil
Really? I tried viewing from an iPad and saw the following message:
<https://tabuleapp.com/u/files/image_135827900654910.jpg>

------
xk_id
Imo, facebook is really focusing on the wrong things here. I'd have been much
more enthusiastic if they offered me tools for better control over my data,
for example (incidentally, I had to spend 40 minutes just the other day using
a Greasemonkey script to erase my entire Timeline). Or if the chat would be
less clumsy. Or if they added cloud-based tools to groups, similar to Google
Docs.

I can't really explain what's going on in their heads… Perhaps I'm just
completely out of their target market, who knows.

------
confluence
Oh so they finally noticed Quora and Google+. Good on them.

Interest based social networks will replace the hodge podge of specialty
forums using anonymous names you see all over the web.

~~~
martinced
I'm really not sure about that...

There are _lots_ of forums (guns, cars, gambling, I.T. security, ...) where
people are very careful about what they post.

I think, on the contrary, that with all that push by FaceBook and G+ to try to
reduce your anonimity more and more we'll see more and more specialized forum
_putting an emphasis on anonimity_.

I even believe there's a wide open door for a pseudonymous social network. One
where people really know each other (you can only add if you know the person
in real life) but where it is specifically forbidden to use any real name.

------
Apocryphon
I'm curious as to the political implications of this, given social media's
increasing presence in recent civil uprisings and government monitoring.

~~~
beatpanda
That ship already sailed. Facebook cooperates pretty extensively with law
enforcement, so while they're announcing a nice, friendly consumer interface,
law enforcement already has way more data than you'll have access to through
this feature.

------
cfqycwz
I think this has really interesting consequences in combination with the "pay
money to send messages to people you aren't friends with" feature Facebook's
been testing lately. That's the revenue potential I immediately saw in this
product with the demo search for "people who like cycling in my hometown"--you
can find them for free, but it will cost you to contact (or direct market to)
them.

------
ihsw
Interestingly Facebook's recent "Facebook Global University Hackathon" was
won[1] by students who also utilized natural language processing.

Here is the previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4871854>

[1] <http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/news/facebook-hackathon>

------
alxndr
"Thanks for signing up for our beta. When Graph Search is ready you'll see an
announcement on Facebook and you can switch to the new experience."

------
wildmXranat
Facebook, Please consider adding the following clause to all queries: AND
WHERE deleted_at IS NULL OR deleted_at = '' OR private = ''

I like the idea of having a query language for facebook data. I just don't
like the idea of having any of my things come up in any search. And yes, I
quit FB a long time ago, but my spidey sense is tingling that FB didn't quit
on my data.

------
mtkd
A new API to see what people build before acquiring first couple of apps and
throttling access?

Being able to weight my Google results with demographic or social graph
attributes would be more useful for me - especially with purchases.

'restaurants in 10km range popular with 30-40 age professionals'

'most popular cookery books up to 3rd degree connections'

'top movies my close friends watched last week'

------
ececconi
The major trend of Facebook is that it is making the world smaller by making
the people you interact with a smaller bubble. This may be a very good thing.
Sometimes, though, it makes me feel like we're carrying out a new type of
social hierarchy by only interacting with people we are like and are friends
of friends with.

------
ojr
It will not compete with my google searches, I usually search for wikipedia
articles, homework questions, and programming tutorials/help... Seeing people
with similar interest is cool but I already do that with meetup.com (very nice
in Boston). I am just out of touch with most of facebook target audience? I
guess so.

------
khmel
FB search as it is not capable to become kickass end-user-oriented product
yet, it's more like a set of technologies that could be used by app developers
to create cool dating\hiring\recommendation services and widgets using real-
time api requests. The best apps will be acquired by Fb or just copied :)

------
joshstrange
Am I missing something?

The query, at one point, is "People who like Cycling and live in Seattle,
Washington" yet the 2nd person "card" clearly states they live in San
Francisco, California.

Pic: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2148004/Screenshots/~-mm.png>

~~~
zdrtx
It's just a mistake in the demo video...

------
bernardom
Looking at this from a different angle: it seems new to me to see Mark
Zuckerberg doing an announcement of a new feature. The video at the bottom
reminded me of an Apple ad (toned down and without Jony Ive's accent).

I wonder if this is part of a new strategy of pushing him out to the public a
little bit more.

------
aganek
I think this a big deal.

The first step to a Yelp killer? Type in "Italian Restaurant" and get back
list of all the restaurants your friends have checked into. A recommendation
engine.

For now, its mostly to filter your facebook data. But do you think it can
expand and become the goto search engine, ala google?

~~~
shock-value
It could maybe work if they do it like Netflix: build a profile of you based
on what you have rated highly, and put you in a pool with similar people
(friends or otherwise), thus providing more accurate recommendations.

But I think Facebook overhypes how much people care about their friend's
preferences, at least for most things. We generally don't pick friends based
on how closely their shopping/eating/whatever habits match ours.

~~~
pico303
At my company we've been arguing this same point for years. It doesn't matter
what your friends like; it matters what people with similar interests like.
Rarely are your friends and family a reflection of all of your likes and
dislikes. I'm sure some psychologist could point out the low probability of
forming friendships with people who are exactly like you.

It seems like Facebook and other social networks took the idea of asking your
friends for a recommendation on a good doctor or auto shop and twisted it into
some overly simplified premise that if one friend likes something, all of my
friends will like it too.

------
faramarz
Very cool! Can't say much else until I try it. I have a large number of
conservative friends who have enabled every privacy setting and provide
minimal meta-data, so I already know it won't be as the PR video depicts.

Anyway, This reminds me of of the Google+ search by www.findpeopleonplus.com

------
cbrsch
Graph Search in one sentence (based on what I see it as): Search built around
friends, not links.

------
loudin
All the people who support this keep saying how everyone else is going to use
the tool to do x, y, or z, but they haven't said what they themselves would do
with it.

So I ask, when you have access to Graph Search, what is the first thing you'll
do with it?

------
ericmsimons
I don't quite see how this is big competition for Google (yet). Facebook GS
can return me more data about my friends than Google can, but Google can
return more results for general information. These seem very different from
one another.

------
ya3r
Two things:

\- "The interface fundamentally determines the behavior" and this thing has a
real great interface. I just don't see how this could be integrated into the
facebook home screen (newsfeed).

\- I wonder how long does it take google to copycat this thing.

------
zaidf
I have a feeling this is more to announce facebook's _intent_ to compete in
search than a product they actually expect people to use. Really it sounds
like a precursor to facebook's google competitor.

------
trendspotter
The video created by Facebook that explains their new "Graph Search" feature.

<https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10200156514653891>

------
state
This is exactly what one would hope from a huge structured data set.

------
trendspotter
It is (or was) live for me. I can take a screenshot for you guys.

------
emehrkay
Looks cool, but what is the fallout? Will Google force feed us + a bit more so
that they can match/better these types of search results.

I need to permanently move to DuckDuckGo

------
ernestipark
This is also on the front page: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5061347>.

------
lmm
Everything old is new again.

Back in `05, the facebook would let you search for people by interest, or age,
or sex. Can't imagine why they stopped that.

------
aganek
Big! Search will fit seamlessly in the Facebook experience. I bet we soon
forget that Facebook didn't always have this function.

------
jskonhovd
This creeps me out more than anything. I already know where I like to hang out
and who my friends are... I go to freenode.

------
daigoba66
So it's just building custom queries? I guess it's novel that you can save the
queries and see it as a "feed".

------
randomchars
I wonder if searching for "Single friends of friends" would work. Optionally
with "who like x".

------
sidcool
Whatever the positives or negatives, the tech behind this effort would be
super duper cool.

------
dhirajbajaj
Social searching is the new business. and with Facebook doing it, it will go
miles.Huge!!!

------
erick23
live Mark Zuckerberg [http://live.theverge.com/facebook-see-what-were-
building-eve...](http://live.theverge.com/facebook-see-what-were-building-
event/)

------
seanlinehan
So Ark, Facebook just Facebooked ya.

------
pokefunat
Their front page demonstration has an error. <http://imgur.com/J7r73>

------
egfx
one question. Any cool new changes to the Graph API? Doesn't look like it.

------
monsterix
Looks like head-on with Google, and then why not? The results are specific to
a user and his/her taste or surroundings. Something that Google also tries to
achieve using history.

Would love to give it a sping. Waitlisted, uh.

