Facebook unveiled its own search engine designed to help users find particular information stored within its vast social network.
Known as Graph Search, it is currently available only as a test version limited to US Facebook users and already there is a waiting list to join. Graph Search is not a copy of search engines like Google or Microsoft’s Bing. It is aimed not at the web as a whole, but the information stored by Facebook.
Users can make their queries in natural english – phrases and sentences – and the answers will be based on what people have shared and “liked”.
Product director Tom Stocky explains:
“There’s really simple things that people want to do. They want to find all the photos they’ve liked. They want to find all the photos of two particular people, all the photos of their family. They want to find all of their friends who live in a particular city because they’re going to visit there.
“Those are really hard things to find right now. You have to go to a bunch of different pages. You have to piece all this stuff together and now it’s easy. You can just say what you want and you get the results.”