Facebook Graph Search is a social search feature the company announced Jan. 15. The feature is currently in private beta with a waitlist for individuals and businesses. You can join the waitlist here (scroll down to the bottom).
Facebook’s announced plan is to roll it out gradually to hundreds of thousands of individuals first (English only), then more broadly for PC-based users, then for non-English languages, and then on mobile.
It isn't clear how quickly this expansion will occur, but several Facebook product people are on record saying they still have work to do to figure out how to scale the computationally intensive searches across millions of concurrent users. (Think of crawling a user’s social and open graph connections across hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of nodes for every search.) Non-trivial engineering challenges stand in the way of mass availability of this feature set.
Facebook’s announced plan is to roll it out gradually to hundreds of thousands of individuals first (English only), then more broadly for PC-based users, then for non-English languages, and then on mobile.
It isn't clear how quickly this expansion will occur, but several Facebook product people are on record saying they still have work to do to figure out how to scale the computationally intensive searches across millions of concurrent users. (Think of crawling a user’s social and open graph connections across hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of nodes for every search.) Non-trivial engineering challenges stand in the way of mass availability of this feature set.
The potential for Facebook’s new Graph Search feature is huge. Brands, digital marketers, and publishers can and should be doing a number of things right now to benefit from it as it reaches critical mass.
A simple rule of thumb is that the more content that gets shared, liked, or commented on through Facebook, the greater the chances of discovery of that content through Graph Search.
What is Facebook Graph Search?
What Does it Do?
It's a very cool feature. When I type in a query, such as “friends who have been to Rome, Italy,” Graph Search traverses all of my relationships and those of my friends to find people who have visited Rome. It then pulls back these people and displays them alongside relevant content. This is a simple example that illustrates the difference between the kinds of results Graph Search returns and how search results from Google (or Bing) would appear.
Another key aspect of this feature is how it appears to include implicit affinities and experiences, in addition to explicit likes and shares people have done through Facebook. When you think about the significance of that, it’s pretty impressive.
Based on the content I’ve shared, as well as the check-ins, posts, and comments I’ve made, plus the images I’ve tagged, etc., Graph Search can infer what I like, where I’ve traveled to, and so forth. The inclusion of implicit affinities is only possible due to Facebook’s massive scale and could ultimately be the component of Graph Search that makes the results valuable enough to get people to use the feature.
What is it Good for?
- People Search – Finding people you’re connected to who have specific interests and experiences
- Local (and Vertical) Search – Finding a business and/or events that friends have visited and/or liked
- Media and Entertainment Search – Finding TV shows, movies, music, and games liked, watched, etc. by your friends
Facebook hasn’t announced how they will monetize the feature. The obvious opportunity is to charge for sponsored listings much like AdWords. There are a few other options as well, including:
- Syndicate aggregated data to advertisers. Data would show what people are searching for, who/what they’re finding, etc.
- Creation of premium audience segments for targeting across the network via the FBX.
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