After News Feeds and Timeline, Facebook has launched its “Third Pillar”: a search engine to search for friends. The social network behemoth has teamed up with Microsoft to launch an internal Facebook Graphic Search engine. This social search engine is powered by Bing search engine of Microsoft. Will Facebook Graphic Search is designed to compete against web search engine of Google? Zuckerberg has responded that –
“We don’t think people will be coming to us exclusively for web search, but we wanted to provide good search results in Graph Search.” Further Lars Rasmussen, Facebook team member, clears the air by explaining that “There’s an integration between Bing and Graph Search so that Bing picks up when Graph can’t deliver relevant results.”
Well, if this will not function as any web search engine, then how will Facebook Graph Search will work and how it is different from Google Search? Let us see.
How to start?
To begin with Facebook Graph Search, you need to sign up and wait for it to be enabled for your Facebook profile. You will find yourself added to a waiting list. You may possibly need to wait a few weeks. You will see a notification box stating “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.”
How to activate?
When it will be activated, you will see a notification like this:
When you will activate Facebook Graph Search, your existing search box will be replaced with this newer search bar in blue. Then, you need to search for friends, areas or things you want to search on the blue area of search box. So, what will you find on Facebook Graph Search bar? You can search for friends, friends’ photos, nearby location such as eateries, music and games your friends like and play, photos which you have liked, commented on, photos taken on particular dates, check weather and current temperature, friends who live nearby, people from your college and university, who worked at previous organization and many more.
We expect Facebook would gradually improve its new Facebook Graph Search by using its extensive repertoire of data and content. Have you signed up for Facebook Graph Search yet? What are you expecting from Facebook Graph Search? Share your opinion below.