The Facebook Graph Search is a new Facebook feature which gives people the ability to ‘map out their relationships with the people and things they care about.’ The Graph Search is a new way for you to find people, photos, places and interests that are most relevant to you on Facebook.
Facebook in one of their newsrooms explained the graph like this:
“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 has been shared on Facebook. We believe they have very different uses.”
It is available as a beta preview on the website, where people can join the waiting list for a preview of the tool.
Facebook will draw its set of results from information such as occupation, alma mater, address, events, etc. that you and I have entered on our profiles; tags, photos, locations we have been to and our long lists of Facebook page likes on communities, brands, activities, etc.
If you are wondering what kind of searches can come out of a Facebook Graph search, Actual Graph Searches, a tumblr blog by Tom Scott, will help you understand it.
Some of the search results which were crowd-sourced are funny, hypocritical and embarrassing at times as shown below:
“Married people who like Prostitutes … these people’s spouses”
“Current employees of Tesco who like horses”
“Current employers of people who like Racism”
“Spouses of married people who like [cheat-on-your-partner dating site] Ashley Madison”
“Mothers of Catholics from Italy who like Durex”
“People who like Focus on the Family [anti gay marriage] and Neil Patrick Harris [very gay and due to be married with kids]”
“Single women who live nearby and who are interested in men and like Getting Drunk”
Have you got a chance to try out Facebook Graph Searches? Do you think it makes the whole process of finding people with specific interests a lot more fun? Will it end up being a boon or a bane to marketing?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments!