Facebook News: Graph Search Revealed, Still In Beta

Amid much anticipation and rumors yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new Facebook feature: Graph Search. Facebook's new search engine hopes to challenge Google, but not by doing a broad websearch the way they do. Instead, Facebook is hoping to offer a whole new way to surf for web content that is not available on standard search engines - Facebook's social network content. 

Typical search engines like Google look for key words in websites to match your search query and in your search results, webpages rise to prominence when they are linked to more than others. The result of a Google search is a list of links to publicly available websites, along with some Google+ content, if you're signed up for that and signed in. When it comes to Facebook pages, though, much of their social media content is not publicly available, barring it from being searchable on sites like Google. 

What Facebook's Graph Search hopes to do is to make that content - starting primarily with people, photos, places, and interests - readily available to searchers. In doing so, Zuckerberg wants to take Facebook back to its college-era roots, making the site more useful in making new connections and friends. Additionally, Graph Search will be responsive to plain-English queries, like, "Which of my friends live nearby?"

Right now Graph Search is in beta, and only available in English. It will be rolled out gradually, starting with a small portion of Facebook users and that particular subset of content (the four listed above) available for search. And for those who immediately worry about privacy - the increased possibility of phishing attacks - for example, Facebook has emphasized that only the information you make available publicly on Facebook will be available through Graph Search.

According to Information Week, Graph Search will eventually expand to cover Facebook posts, mobile, other languages, and possibly third-party Facebook-connected apps. Until then, if you want to try out Graph Search, you have to sign up on a waiting list. And if you want to hide your information, get on to your privacy settings and start buttoning up your profile now.