6 ms·

Facebook Unleashes Open Graph Search Engine, Declares War On Google

62 points by pier0 16y ago

hsmyers 16y ago
Mongol warriors declare war on Panzer division. News at 11:00.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  What's the terrain? Apparent technological supremacy isn't a guarantee of superior warring ability - recent history should have taught us this at least. ;0)>
  - tansey 16y ago
    Except Google won't be interested in nation building. :)
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Hopefully they are not playing civilization then. They might actually have a shot at winning.
benofsky 16y ago
I can imagine this being incredibly effective, Facebook have discovered an effective method for human powered search that covers the whole internet (EDIT: was referring to the like button here). Not only that, search results could be tailored to your age category, interests, what other people like you "liked". Put simply, this is genius. EDIT: why am I being downvoted so much? Just my opinion.
- what 16y ago
  What do you mean by "discovered an effective method for human powered search that covers the whole internet?" Their indexing seems rather easy to game. From what I understand you have to include some FB specific metadata tags to tell FB to index it and what's on the page. What's stopping someone from putting metadata tags to say it's a page for a hotel somewhere or a movie, when they are really selling Viagra?
  - nissimk 16y ago
    Isn't it because the "pagerank" of your page increases by how many people "like" your page instead of how many other sites link to your page. This really is quite interesting because it's easier to press Like than it is to write an intelligent post with a lot of words that links to the site that you like. The downside seems that every site has to buy in and put the like button on their site, but it looks like it's already too late and there's not much choice.
    - abstractbill 16y ago
      It's still easy to game, because there's no "dislike" button. Show 50% of your visitors a really valuable awesome page, and the other 50% the viagra spam. You'll get a ton of "likes" from the awesome page, and hence a lot of traffic for the spam.
      - jawn 16y ago
        Furthermore, with fake accounts, it becomes even easier to game facebook pagerank.
        calcnerd256 16y ago
        Unless they implement trust. "Your friends [in this friend list] like these pages today."
        jawn 16y ago
        Allowing only trusted search results would greatly reduce the number of links returned. For most searches no results at all would be returned.
        sanj 16y ago
        When you click through to the page, you'll see if any of your friends liked it.
        sanj 16y ago
jgrahamc 16y ago
I don't think this is very compelling. The example given (searching for a particular Marriott) works flawlessly in Google and I can get at much more information than Open Graph tagged sites will give me. What problem is this solving?
- izendejas 16y ago
  What facebook is trying to build is not a search engine. Rather, I believe they're building more of a recommendation engine. As your friends (in theory) begin to "like" a bunch of stuff on the web, next time you do a search for hotels, the hotels your friends "liked" will show up. The meta data for each site/artist, etc you like will also give them (in theory) enough data to recommend not just on what your friends like. Whoever unlocks the magic in the data and offers a compelling, personalized experience will rule the next decade.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - bad_user 16y ago
    > As your friends (in theory) begin to "like" a bunch of stuff on the web, next time you do a search for hotels, the hotels your friends "liked" will show up. The ranking algorithm used by Google most definitely factors in the clicks that webpage received ... and they can also calculate if a user is satisfied with a certain result (if not, that user will get back to the search results page). Google has all the data it needs for me to view the hotels my friends liked. Not only that, but it has better data ... when one of my friends says he likes something on Facebook, that's mostly a vanity / ego-inflating action (oh, look at me, I'm so great for liking this stuff). When one of my friends clicks on a hotel link in Google, though, the recommendation he gives is implicit, not explicit. The problem with Google is that they have a lot of noise (they are the first target when webmasters want to become visible, so every piece of shit on the web is crawled by Google). And in the battle of spam versus Google, spam is winning. If you don't believe me, try searching for interesting stuff to read in a certain area (like ruby on rails) on http://delicious.com http://delicious.com. The same principle applies, with the difference being that delicious doesn't index the content on those pages and it also doesn't have a lot of spam ... so if you're searching for clear tags, like "data mining", you're going to get pretty good results, simply because bookmarking a link on delicious is not ego-inflating. So, IMHO ... one day a better search engine will emerge from social networks, but it's not going to be based on any "like" button.
troymc 16y ago
As far as I understand it, website owners have to opt out of being indexed by Google (via robots.txt), but they have to opt in to being indexed by Facebook (by adding the "Like" button). Or am I reading this wrong? If website owners add the Open Graph Protocol <meta> tags in the <head> of their web pages, then Google (and every other search engine) can see that information as well.
- enjo 16y ago
  That seems to be the idea. However, that's likely a strength for Facebook really. By creating a self-selecting index they're really removing a lot of cruft right up front. IIRC Google tried something along these lines. You could (maybe still can?) sort of meta moderate search results letting Google know which ones you thought where 'best'. Same thing here, by liking a page you lend relevance to that page. I believe OneRiot also does something like this. They have a widely installed toolbar that is out there collecting information about what users are looking at. It aggregates this information to figure out what is important at this particular moment. In other words, it determines relevance by attention. Facebook would be doing something similar here. The more attention (likes) a page receives, the more relevant it is. I'm not sure if that actually delivers better results, or even meaningful ones at all. It's definitely an interesting move tho.
  - martian 16y ago
    For that matter, Google knows probably as much as any entity can ever hope to know about people's browsing behaviors. They track what sites people click from their search results, they'll know if you go back immediately to search, or try a different search, if you're not happy with the results. They have Google Analytics installed on millions of domains and know intimately the behavior of users on those sites. I really fail to see how the simplicity of a binary "like" button on opt-in pages with easily-spammable RDF tags can compete with this.
  - moultano 16y ago
    All of the real cruft on the internet wants to be in every search engine it can. The real gems are entirely oblivious to where their traffic comes from / could come from.
mithaler 16y ago
I don't know about most people, but when I want to learn about the merits of a product or company, my first thought is to search for a variety of independent opinions of it, not the product/company's own marketing. Thus, the last thing I would want to do is go to its Facebook page. I might want to go to its website first to understand what they themselves are trying to do in their own words, but Google can do that just fine, thank you. Thus, I don't really understand what niche they're trying to fill.
- adammichaelc 16y ago
  Facebook's search strategy reaches outside its walled garden and stretches out to the open web. So Facebook search results might include a few Facebook pages, but the majority of results will be web-pages that were more "liked" than others. I think where it gets interesting is when you narrow the scope down to just what your friends "liked", or what men in the South Bay "liked," or people interested in football, engineering, art, or who are doctors, etc. You start to get into the long tail of search, which might open up some very interesting results.
- bbwharris 16y ago
  That's what I do too. However, there are a lot of users who simply want to buy something. There are also a lot of users who are on Facebook all the time. It almost IS the internet to them.
mark_l_watson 16y ago
I have a low priority work task to keep curent with FB's Open Graph (but mostly hacking Freebase). There is something to "like links" instead of URLs, but we will see how this plays out. One thing that may be in FB's favor: even less than good ideas and algorithms can win big if you have enough data.
rgrieselhuber 16y ago
The problem with the results you would get back on Facebook search is that they are far less monetizable than the resume you would get on, say, Amazon. Google is at least halfway in between the two.
keltex 16y ago
I think this is just about the advertising dollars. Facebook is quickly learning that on-page advertising conversion rates (and thus ad rates) are much lower than search. So they want a piece of that action. The other thing they really need to do is become the default search engine on some popular browsers. Obviously Chrome is out and probably Firefox, but there's no reason they couldn't become one of the options on IE 9.
kadavy 16y ago
It would be nice to see a search engine with some social intelligence, because Google is too easy to game, and has been giving poor results of late.
- josefresco 16y ago
  If Google is too easy to game, you'd be doing it and not telling a soul until the well was dry. In reality you see some people having success and automatically assume it's easy. It is easy to game Google (a little), but not at all if you want to make legitimate money.
  - kadavy 16y ago
    You have no way of knowing whether I'm gaming Google or not. But anyway, what I'm referring to is the amount of spammy content that comes up when you do a Google search, while truly useful content doesn't do so well. Honestly, have you ever read a good article on About.com? Yet they rank very well on Google. Search could still be much better. While Google is great, they don't understand people well enough to make the necessary improvements.
OlavHN 16y ago
At school we had business case on the facebook platform yesterday. It said googles main worry was facebook data being used to make a search engine. And it makes sense - data about me and my network is a huge heuristic in ranking pages. Also, the lecturer said sites increasingly saw more referrals coming from facebook and twitter than google. That was news to me.
fjabre 16y ago
Why does this feel like the second coming of AOL?
finiteloop 16y ago
This is Bret Taylor, CTO of Facebook. I just wanted to clarify a couple of things because I think people are reading a bit too much into our actions. First, Open Graph-enabled web pages have been appearing in search since the product launched in April. This is not new and not indicative of a change in strategy. Likewise, only the pages your friends have liked appear in your personalized search results. While we plan on increasing the pages’ distribution through search in the future, right now, search is not the focus of the team working on product. We are focused on discovery and enabling users to build out their profile by liking things around the web. So we aren't really declaring war on anyone. But it does make a compelling headline :)
- banjiewen 16y ago
  Even with all the supposed deterioration of HN, comments like this keep me coming back for more. Thanks, Bret!
- biznickman 16y ago
  Hey Bret, This is Nick. Compelling headline indeed. As I told someone else at Facebook today, unfortunately it's difficult to gain traction without a compelling headline. However the article doesn't specify a specific change in strategy just a continuation of the existing one. As I posted this morning, declaring war may be a bit of an exaggeration, however most people have been unaware that content off Facebook shows up in search results and that pages can be optimized for such. At f8 this was announced but not until recently did I begin seeing results that link off-site. The article was a way to illustrate how the Open Graph underlies Facebook's search strategy. Until you show the average user a picture of what that means, theoretical discussion only gets so far. I hope it wasn't interpreted as a shift in strategy, but a photo is worth a thousand words and a headline can multiply that! You and I (as well as most people on this site) understood the implications of the Open Graph, but the average user had no idea what it meant. The search results image makes things more apparent. Happy to adjust if you think this is excessive sensationalism ... this is definitely an ambitious search strategy no matter which way you cut it. Best, Nick O'Neill (AllFacebook.com)
  - deleted 16y ago

62 points by pier0 16y ago

hsmyers 16y ago

Mongol warriors declare war on Panzer division. News at 11:00.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
What's the terrain? Apparent technological supremacy isn't a guarantee of superior warring ability - recent history should have taught us this at least. ;0)>
- tansey 16y ago
  Except Google won't be interested in nation building. :)
tomjen3 16y ago
Hopefully they are not playing civilization then. They might actually have a shot at winning.

benofsky 16y ago

I can imagine this being incredibly effective, Facebook have discovered an effective method for human powered search that covers the whole internet (EDIT: was referring to the like button here). Not only that, search results could be tailored to your age category, interests, what other people like you "liked". Put simply, this is genius. EDIT: why am I being downvoted so much? Just my opinion.

what 16y ago
What do you mean by "discovered an effective method for human powered search that covers the whole internet?" Their indexing seems rather easy to game. From what I understand you have to include some FB specific metadata tags to tell FB to index it and what's on the page. What's stopping someone from putting metadata tags to say it's a page for a hotel somewhere or a movie, when they are really selling Viagra?
- nissimk 16y ago
  Isn't it because the "pagerank" of your page increases by how many people "like" your page instead of how many other sites link to your page. This really is quite interesting because it's easier to press Like than it is to write an intelligent post with a lot of words that links to the site that you like. The downside seems that every site has to buy in and put the like button on their site, but it looks like it's already too late and there's not much choice.
  - abstractbill 16y ago
    It's still easy to game, because there's no "dislike" button. Show 50% of your visitors a really valuable awesome page, and the other 50% the viagra spam. You'll get a ton of "likes" from the awesome page, and hence a lot of traffic for the spam.
    - jawn 16y ago
      Furthermore, with fake accounts, it becomes even easier to game facebook pagerank.
      - calcnerd256 16y ago
        Unless they implement trust. "Your friends [in this friend list] like these pages today."
        jawn 16y ago
        Allowing only trusted search results would greatly reduce the number of links returned. For most searches no results at all would be returned.
        sanj 16y ago
        When you click through to the page, you'll see if any of your friends liked it.
      - sanj 16y ago

jgrahamc 16y ago

I don't think this is very compelling. The example given (searching for a particular Marriott) works flawlessly in Google and I can get at much more information than Open Graph tagged sites will give me. What problem is this solving?

izendejas 16y ago
What facebook is trying to build is not a search engine. Rather, I believe they're building more of a recommendation engine. As your friends (in theory) begin to "like" a bunch of stuff on the web, next time you do a search for hotels, the hotels your friends "liked" will show up. The meta data for each site/artist, etc you like will also give them (in theory) enough data to recommend not just on what your friends like. Whoever unlocks the magic in the data and offers a compelling, personalized experience will rule the next decade.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- bad_user 16y ago
  > As your friends (in theory) begin to "like" a bunch of stuff on the web, next time you do a search for hotels, the hotels your friends "liked" will show up. The ranking algorithm used by Google most definitely factors in the clicks that webpage received ... and they can also calculate if a user is satisfied with a certain result (if not, that user will get back to the search results page). Google has all the data it needs for me to view the hotels my friends liked. Not only that, but it has better data ... when one of my friends says he likes something on Facebook, that's mostly a vanity / ego-inflating action (oh, look at me, I'm so great for liking this stuff). When one of my friends clicks on a hotel link in Google, though, the recommendation he gives is implicit, not explicit. The problem with Google is that they have a lot of noise (they are the first target when webmasters want to become visible, so every piece of shit on the web is crawled by Google). And in the battle of spam versus Google, spam is winning. If you don't believe me, try searching for interesting stuff to read in a certain area (like ruby on rails) on http://delicious.com http://delicious.com. The same principle applies, with the difference being that delicious doesn't index the content on those pages and it also doesn't have a lot of spam ... so if you're searching for clear tags, like "data mining", you're going to get pretty good results, simply because bookmarking a link on delicious is not ego-inflating. So, IMHO ... one day a better search engine will emerge from social networks, but it's not going to be based on any "like" button.

troymc 16y ago

As far as I understand it, website owners have to opt out of being indexed by Google (via robots.txt), but they have to opt in to being indexed by Facebook (by adding the "Like" button). Or am I reading this wrong? If website owners add the Open Graph Protocol <meta> tags in the <head> of their web pages, then Google (and every other search engine) can see that information as well.

enjo 16y ago
That seems to be the idea. However, that's likely a strength for Facebook really. By creating a self-selecting index they're really removing a lot of cruft right up front. IIRC Google tried something along these lines. You could (maybe still can?) sort of meta moderate search results letting Google know which ones you thought where 'best'. Same thing here, by liking a page you lend relevance to that page. I believe OneRiot also does something like this. They have a widely installed toolbar that is out there collecting information about what users are looking at. It aggregates this information to figure out what is important at this particular moment. In other words, it determines relevance by attention. Facebook would be doing something similar here. The more attention (likes) a page receives, the more relevant it is. I'm not sure if that actually delivers better results, or even meaningful ones at all. It's definitely an interesting move tho.
- martian 16y ago
  For that matter, Google knows probably as much as any entity can ever hope to know about people's browsing behaviors. They track what sites people click from their search results, they'll know if you go back immediately to search, or try a different search, if you're not happy with the results. They have Google Analytics installed on millions of domains and know intimately the behavior of users on those sites. I really fail to see how the simplicity of a binary "like" button on opt-in pages with easily-spammable RDF tags can compete with this.
- moultano 16y ago
  All of the real cruft on the internet wants to be in every search engine it can. The real gems are entirely oblivious to where their traffic comes from / could come from.

mithaler 16y ago

I don't know about most people, but when I want to learn about the merits of a product or company, my first thought is to search for a variety of independent opinions of it, not the product/company's own marketing. Thus, the last thing I would want to do is go to its Facebook page. I might want to go to its website first to understand what they themselves are trying to do in their own words, but Google can do that just fine, thank you. Thus, I don't really understand what niche they're trying to fill.

adammichaelc 16y ago
Facebook's search strategy reaches outside its walled garden and stretches out to the open web. So Facebook search results might include a few Facebook pages, but the majority of results will be web-pages that were more "liked" than others. I think where it gets interesting is when you narrow the scope down to just what your friends "liked", or what men in the South Bay "liked," or people interested in football, engineering, art, or who are doctors, etc. You start to get into the long tail of search, which might open up some very interesting results.
bbwharris 16y ago
That's what I do too. However, there are a lot of users who simply want to buy something. There are also a lot of users who are on Facebook all the time. It almost IS the internet to them.

mark_l_watson 16y ago

I have a low priority work task to keep curent with FB's Open Graph (but mostly hacking Freebase). There is something to "like links" instead of URLs, but we will see how this plays out. One thing that may be in FB's favor: even less than good ideas and algorithms can win big if you have enough data.

rgrieselhuber 16y ago

The problem with the results you would get back on Facebook search is that they are far less monetizable than the resume you would get on, say, Amazon. Google is at least halfway in between the two.

keltex 16y ago

I think this is just about the advertising dollars. Facebook is quickly learning that on-page advertising conversion rates (and thus ad rates) are much lower than search. So they want a piece of that action. The other thing they really need to do is become the default search engine on some popular browsers. Obviously Chrome is out and probably Firefox, but there's no reason they couldn't become one of the options on IE 9.

kadavy 16y ago

It would be nice to see a search engine with some social intelligence, because Google is too easy to game, and has been giving poor results of late.

josefresco 16y ago
If Google is too easy to game, you'd be doing it and not telling a soul until the well was dry. In reality you see some people having success and automatically assume it's easy. It is easy to game Google (a little), but not at all if you want to make legitimate money.
- kadavy 16y ago
  You have no way of knowing whether I'm gaming Google or not. But anyway, what I'm referring to is the amount of spammy content that comes up when you do a Google search, while truly useful content doesn't do so well. Honestly, have you ever read a good article on About.com? Yet they rank very well on Google. Search could still be much better. While Google is great, they don't understand people well enough to make the necessary improvements.

OlavHN 16y ago

At school we had business case on the facebook platform yesterday. It said googles main worry was facebook data being used to make a search engine. And it makes sense - data about me and my network is a huge heuristic in ranking pages. Also, the lecturer said sites increasingly saw more referrals coming from facebook and twitter than google. That was news to me.

fjabre 16y ago

Why does this feel like the second coming of AOL?

finiteloop 16y ago

This is Bret Taylor, CTO of Facebook. I just wanted to clarify a couple of things because I think people are reading a bit too much into our actions. First, Open Graph-enabled web pages have been appearing in search since the product launched in April. This is not new and not indicative of a change in strategy. Likewise, only the pages your friends have liked appear in your personalized search results. While we plan on increasing the pages’ distribution through search in the future, right now, search is not the focus of the team working on product. We are focused on discovery and enabling users to build out their profile by liking things around the web. So we aren't really declaring war on anyone. But it does make a compelling headline :)

banjiewen 16y ago
Even with all the supposed deterioration of HN, comments like this keep me coming back for more. Thanks, Bret!
biznickman 16y ago
Hey Bret, This is Nick. Compelling headline indeed. As I told someone else at Facebook today, unfortunately it's difficult to gain traction without a compelling headline. However the article doesn't specify a specific change in strategy just a continuation of the existing one. As I posted this morning, declaring war may be a bit of an exaggeration, however most people have been unaware that content off Facebook shows up in search results and that pages can be optimized for such. At f8 this was announced but not until recently did I begin seeing results that link off-site. The article was a way to illustrate how the Open Graph underlies Facebook's search strategy. Until you show the average user a picture of what that means, theoretical discussion only gets so far. I hope it wasn't interpreted as a shift in strategy, but a photo is worth a thousand words and a headline can multiply that! You and I (as well as most people on this site) understood the implications of the Open Graph, but the average user had no idea what it meant. The search results image makes things more apparent. Happy to adjust if you think this is excessive sensationalism ... this is definitely an ambitious search strategy no matter which way you cut it. Best, Nick O'Neill (AllFacebook.com)
- deleted 16y ago