The Graph Search that Facebook initially had, now fails to impress Facebook users. People could not get exactly what they used to look for. A search for ‘friends in NY’ could end up in the result like, ‘Best Friends Animal Society, NY’. In a recent announcement Zuckerberg has promised that this is going to change. Graph Search is going to make the searching process better and easier. Graph Search uses all the information put in by the users to publish the result of a search with a particular question.
According to the Facebook wizard, the searching process will be supported by this social media site itself. If you type a question for ‘find friends’, they will suggest other add ons like, ‘who like skuba diving’, etc. So, Facebook uses a cross reference to find out streamlined results to your queries. As the site will be searching through all the information put in from the very beginning of Facebook, you can even have a peek at the data uploaded even 7 years back. So, if you drop the search question ‘ my friend’s photos taken before 1990s’, you can be surprised with some amazing moments of her life.
This feature is going to be extremely beneficial for the small businesses. When you look for some local eateries, Graph Search will come up with results consisting of eateries that your friends like. So, this time Facebook will also focus on peoples’ interests. This particular characteristic of the feature is useful for both, the user and the small businesses. The user can go to the local eatery when he is hungry. He does not need to go a long way for that.
Big brands are also going to be benefited by this feature as the “likes” by users are going to get importance. Sentiment gets priority for finding results that suit your need the best.
Doubts:
Few of the critics still doubt the result of this change to come. Many suspect that in the days to come, Facebook Graph Search is going to expose a huge amount of data, the privacy of which is at stake. If you forget what exactly you posted and do not put a privacy tag on them, chances are their all that data will be visible to your friends.
The announcement does not clearly state whether the searching tool will index every word in the posts or not. If it does so, results of searches are going to be even more interesting. For example, you will be able to find out “Friends who are enjoying weekend party and having vodka”.
Whatever the consequence happen to be, there is no doubt that Facebook is going to bring in a huge change in the field of data search. The results of these searches are likely to have great impact on the sales of big or small businesses too. All they have to do is to impress more and more people to get more ‘likes’. So, Facebook makes that old saying work, “Perform or perish”.
