

Facebook Unleashes Open Graph Search Engine, Declares War On Google - pier0
http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/06/facebook-unleashes-open-graph-search-engine-declares-war-on-google/

======
finiteloop
This is Bret Taylor, CTO of Facebook. I just wanted to clarify a couple of
things because I think people are reading a bit too much into our actions.

First, Open Graph-enabled web pages have been appearing in search since the
product launched in April. This is not new and not indicative of a change in
strategy.

Likewise, only the pages your friends have liked appear in your personalized
search results. While we plan on increasing the pages’ distribution through
search in the future, right now, search is not the focus of the team working
on product. We are focused on discovery and enabling users to build out their
profile by liking things around the web.

So we aren't really declaring war on anyone. But it does make a compelling
headline :)

~~~
biznickman
Hey Bret,

This is Nick. Compelling headline indeed. As I told someone else at Facebook
today, unfortunately it's difficult to gain traction without a compelling
headline. However the article doesn't specify a specific change in strategy
just a continuation of the existing one.

As I posted this morning, declaring war may be a bit of an exaggeration,
however most people have been unaware that content off Facebook shows up in
search results and that pages can be optimized for such.

At f8 this was announced but not until recently did I begin seeing results
that link off-site. The article was a way to illustrate how the Open Graph
underlies Facebook's search strategy. Until you show the average user a
picture of what that means, theoretical discussion only gets so far.

I hope it wasn't interpreted as a shift in strategy, but a photo is worth a
thousand words and a headline can multiply that! You and I (as well as most
people on this site) understood the implications of the Open Graph, but the
average user had no idea what it meant.

The search results image makes things more apparent. Happy to adjust if you
think this is excessive sensationalism ... this is definitely an ambitious
search strategy no matter which way you cut it.

Best, Nick O'Neill (AllFacebook.com)

~~~
blakeross
> unfortunately it's difficult to gain traction without a compelling headline.

The difficulties of the journalism industry don't excuse bad reporting.

------
hsmyers
Mongol warriors declare war on Panzer division. News at 11:00.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
What's the terrain? Apparent technological supremacy isn't a guarantee of
superior warring ability - recent history should have taught us this at least.

;0)>

~~~
tansey
Except Google won't be interested in nation building. :)

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jgrahamc
I don't think this is very compelling. The example given (searching for a
particular Marriott) works flawlessly in Google and I can get at much more
information than Open Graph tagged sites will give me.

What problem is this solving?

~~~
Aaronontheweb
I think Facebook is vastly overestimating the number of people who are
actually going to go out and "like" stuff.

~~~
sanj
The effort of Liking is easily an order of magnitude less than creating a
link, which is what (nominally) Google uses.

And I'd SWAG that an order of magnitude more people are capable of Liking than
are even able to create a new link.

~~~
Aaronontheweb
The effort to implement a like button on a site is an order of magnitude more
difficult than implementing a link.

~~~
steveklabnik
Actually, it's not. Instead of an a tag, it's an iframe where the link is
passed in as a parameter.

It took me approximately 90 seconds to implement from looking at the docs to
deploy to one of my sites.

~~~
jonknee
Technically 90 seconds _is_ an order of magnitude more difficult than making a
regular link. Not a huge hurdle, but I don't need to read any docs or go fetch
embed code to make a link.

~~~
steveklabnik
... I guess it's also because I'm using Rails, so I'm already generating links
via a helper function. So I wrote another, one line helper that does the
wrapping. So that initial 90 seconds is amortized over every new Like button I
add, because I use like_url rather than link_to.

Also, often like buttons are used on something like stories, so you're only
adding the code to one template, and now you have tons of like buttons all
over.

~~~
bbwharris
I chose to go the other route which takes even longer. Load the XFBML version,
and include the open graph meta tags.

I did the same thing that you did, wrapped it all in a like_url helper.

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troymc
As far as I understand it, website owners have to opt out of being indexed by
Google (via robots.txt), but they have to opt in to being indexed by Facebook
(by adding the "Like" button). Or am I reading this wrong?

If website owners add the Open Graph Protocol <meta> tags in the <head> of
their web pages, then Google (and every other search engine) can see that
information as well.

~~~
enjo
That seems to be the idea. However, that's likely a strength for Facebook
really. By creating a self-selecting index they're really removing a lot of
cruft right up front.

IIRC Google tried something along these lines. You could (maybe still can?)
sort of meta moderate search results letting Google know which ones you
thought where 'best'. Same thing here, by liking a page you lend relevance to
that page.

I believe OneRiot also does something like this. They have a widely installed
toolbar that is out there collecting information about what users are looking
at. It aggregates this information to figure out what is important at this
particular moment. In other words, it determines relevance by attention.
Facebook would be doing something similar here. The more attention (likes) a
page receives, the more relevant it is.

I'm not sure if that actually delivers better results, or even meaningful ones
at all. It's definitely an interesting move tho.

~~~
moultano
All of the real cruft on the internet wants to be in every search engine it
can. The real gems are entirely oblivious to where their traffic comes from /
could come from.

------
mithaler
I don't know about most people, but when I want to learn about the merits of a
product or company, my first thought is to search for a variety of independent
opinions of it, not the product/company's own marketing.

Thus, the last thing I would want to do is go to its Facebook page. I might
want to go to its website first to understand what they themselves are trying
to do in their own words, but Google can do that just fine, thank you. Thus, I
don't really understand what niche they're trying to fill.

~~~
adammichaelc
Facebook's search strategy reaches outside its walled garden and stretches out
to the open web. So Facebook search results might include a few Facebook
pages, but the majority of results will be web-pages that were more "liked"
than others.

I think where it gets interesting is when you narrow the scope down to just
what your friends "liked", or what men in the South Bay "liked," or people
interested in football, engineering, art, or who are doctors, etc. You start
to get into the long tail of search, which might open up some very interesting
results.

------
fjabre
Why does this feel like the second coming of AOL?

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keltex
I think this is just about the advertising dollars. Facebook is quickly
learning that on-page advertising conversion rates (and thus ad rates) are
much lower than search. So they want a piece of that action.

The other thing they really need to do is become the default search engine on
some popular browsers. Obviously Chrome is out and probably Firefox, but
there's no reason they couldn't become one of the options on IE 9.

------
benofsky
I can imagine this being incredibly effective, Facebook have discovered an
effective method for human powered search that covers the whole internet
(EDIT: was referring to the like button here).

Not only that, search results could be tailored to your age category,
interests, what other people like you "liked". Put simply, this is genius.

EDIT: why am I being downvoted so much? Just my opinion.

~~~
what
What do you mean by "discovered an effective method for human powered search
that covers the whole internet?"

Their indexing seems rather easy to game. From what I understand you have to
include some FB specific metadata tags to tell FB to index it and what's on
the page. What's stopping someone from putting metadata tags to say it's a
page for a hotel somewhere or a movie, when they are really selling Viagra?

~~~
nissimk
Isn't it because the "pagerank" of your page increases by how many people
"like" your page instead of how many other sites link to your page. This
really is quite interesting because it's easier to press Like than it is to
write an intelligent post with a lot of words that links to the site that you
like. The downside seems that every site has to buy in and put the like button
on their site, but it looks like it's already too late and there's not much
choice.

~~~
abstractbill
It's still easy to game, because there's no "dislike" button. Show 50% of your
visitors a really valuable awesome page, and the other 50% the viagra spam.
You'll get a ton of "likes" from the awesome page, and hence a lot of traffic
for the spam.

~~~
jawn
Furthermore, with fake accounts, it becomes even easier to game facebook
pagerank.

~~~
calcnerd256
Unless they implement trust. "Your friends [in this friend list] like these
pages today."

~~~
jawn
Allowing only trusted search results would greatly reduce the number of links
returned. For most searches no results at all would be returned.

------
OlavHN
At school we had business case on the facebook platform yesterday. It said
googles main worry was facebook data being used to make a search engine. And
it makes sense - data about me and my network is a huge heuristic in ranking
pages. Also, the lecturer said sites increasingly saw more referrals coming
from facebook and twitter than google. That was news to me.

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mark_l_watson
I have a low priority work task to keep curent with FB's Open Graph (but
mostly hacking Freebase). There is something to "like links" instead of URLs,
but we will see how this plays out.

One thing that may be in FB's favor: even less than good ideas and algorithms
can win big if you have enough data.

------
rgrieselhuber
The problem with the results you would get back on Facebook search is that
they are far less monetizable than the resume you would get on, say, Amazon.
Google is at least halfway in between the two.

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kadavy
It would be nice to see a search engine with some social intelligence, because
Google is too easy to game, and has been giving poor results of late.

~~~
josefresco
If Google is too easy to game, you'd be doing it and not telling a soul until
the well was dry. In reality you see _some_ people having success and
automatically assume it's _easy_. It is easy to game Google (a little), but
not at all if you want to make legitimate money.

~~~
kadavy
You have no way of knowing whether I'm gaming Google or not.

But anyway, what I'm referring to is the amount of spammy content that comes
up when you do a Google search, while truly useful content doesn't do so well.
Honestly, have you ever read a _good_ article on About.com? Yet they rank very
well on Google.

Search could still be much better. While Google is great, they don't
understand people well enough to make the necessary improvements.

