14 ms·

Introducing Graph Search

• seanlinehan 14y ago
  I may be being a bit of a braggadocio, but the 5-person startup I work for in featured in their blog post announcing the product... pretty unexpected coverage! http://www.facebook-studio.com/news/item/introducing-graph-search-help-people-discover-your-business http://www.facebook-studio.com/news/item/introducing-graph-s...
• timrpeterson 14y ago
  bfd, lame.
• dhirajbajaj 14y ago
  Social searching is the new business. and with Facebook doing it, it will go miles.Huge!!!
• seanlinehan 14y ago
  So Ark, Facebook just Facebooked ya.
• xk_id 14y ago
  Imo, facebook is really focusing on the wrong things here. I'd have been much more enthusiastic if they offered me tools for better control over my data, for example (incidentally, I had to spend 40 minutes just the other day using a Greasemonkey script to erase my entire Timeline). Or if the chat would be less clumsy. Or if they added cloud-based tools to groups, similar to Google Docs. I can't really explain what's going on in their heads… Perhaps I'm just completely out of their target market, who knows.
• DannyBee 14y ago
  I guess i don't get why I should care. I either have to unfriend people to get it to give me stuff i care about (since it appears to have no way to explain i don't give a shit what my grandma thinks about sushi in palo alto), or it's giving me answers that don't seem better. I understand they needed to improve their site/internal search, and this looks great for that. But it just doesn't seem like that big a deal to me. What am i missing?
  • nkwiatek 14y ago
    "People who live in Palo Alto who like Sushi who aren't my Grandma" It's the future
    • DannyBee 14y ago
      ITYM "People who live in Palo Alto who like Sushi who aren't my Grandma or my one friend bob who has horrible taste or oh crap that one guy fred who i accidentally friended or ..." I don't know anyone who has a very clean social graph that they can formulate sane preference queries about.
      • jonknee 14y ago
        Indeed. Which is exactly why you're better served using a dataset that includes people you don't know (and ideally who aren't like you or else everyone will segment off into the same couple spots like middle school). The wisdom of crowds doesn't mean the wisdom of your rolodex.
      • ryusage 14y ago
        I did at one point organize my FB friends into groups like Family, Close Friends, Acquaintances, Distant Friends, People I Know From That One Club, etc. If I were going to use this, I'd probably just filter it to use the Close Friends group. Or if I know I have similar taste to one or two friends, I'd just limit it to them. I dunno, I'm not sure how I feel about this yet, but I can certainly see some ways I could use it.
      • prostoalex 14y ago
        How much information on sushi places in Palo Alto is your grandma pumping into the system to dominate that sector? Is she checking into multiple sushi places dozens of times a day? It's like supplementing every google query with -site:4chan.org on the off-chance a search for a camera lens spec or node.js tutorial would lead to 4chan.
        • DannyBee 14y ago
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  • tych0 14y ago
    Yep, here too.
  • chetan51 14y ago
    Try it in Incognito?
• trendspotter 14y ago
  It is (or was) live for me. I can take a screenshot for you guys.
• alxndr 14y ago
  "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."
• phwd 14y ago
  I'm torn. On one side I really like it, it reminds me of the old People Search feature Facebook used to have. On the other side for third party developers especially those who try to make the Facebook experience better, I'm afraid this is reinforcing the point you should not build 100% on platforms. I'm sure there are many who have had this idea or are building this currently. Facebook Heroku templates given for new developers to start with, hit on the four main areas that Graph Search seem to provide. Another example would be a query like movies liked by people who like movies I like In FQL the closest I would have gotten was SELECT name, page_id from page where page_id in (SELECT page_id from page_fan where uid in (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = me()) and profile_section='movies') And even then FQL was unstable So then you wonder, why use an app with an unstable query built on an API filled with bugs when I can faster get the result using facebook.com?
  • mutual_likes 14y ago
    I would be torn too if people used my app, but I like this. Building your own app has it's limits. I built a facebook app to show mutual likes sorted by likes because facebook's pages browser only showed mutual likes sorted by friends. The FQL to do this is slow and unusable if someone has many hundreds of friends and likes. Plus, some friends don't allow apps to query their data, so the result is incomplete. My feature request would be to allow us to create and share custom FQL and views computed and rendered by facebook. Then, friends don't have to give permission to apps to access their data and facebook runs the query faster.
  • hresult 14y ago
    “I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
  • angryasian 14y ago
    in your example, look how difficult it is for a company like netflix that has just about every movie you've seen and rated along with everyone else's. Along with friends lists. Now take Facebook who is trying to apply this generalization along multiple categories. Its going to be very difficult to get right.
• ernestipark 14y ago
  This is also on the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5061347 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5061347.
• aviswanathan 14y ago
  Not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet, but if you watch the video on the bottom part of the page with Zuck, one of them explicitly says how this product competes with Google. Something about how if two people search for Apple on Google, they'll get the same results, but if they search Apple on FB Graph Search, they'll get personalized results. It's really interesting from a technology perspective the way that search is becoming personalized, and we've definitely seen Google eyeballing search personalization, but it's been limited pretty much to geo and the limited info on G+. Facebook is uniquely positioned to use the volume of data on each person to provide more meaningful results. From a revenue perspective, I think this is definitely competitive to Google. Not saying it will succeed, but businesses will definitely see value in advertising to hyper-specific segments and personal groups. It sounds strange to say, but I do think UI and speed will be key components of whether FB GS will do well. Search is a convenience market, and if FB GS isn't convenient, Google is always one click away.
  • jonknee 14y ago
    > one of them explicitly says how this product competes with Google. Something about how if two people search for Apple on Google, they'll get the same results, but if they search Apple on FB Graph Search, they'll get personalized results. Except that's not true. Google personalizes results for users and also sometime integrates social aspects (through Google+). If I search for pizza I see a map of pizza places close to me, their average reviews, links to find out more, photos, etc etc. I don't know if a Facebook friend once at a slice there, but I also don't care whatsoever and would rather not see it to be honest.
    • ry0ohki 14y ago
      >Google personalizes results for users and also sometime >integrates social aspects Right, except this doesn't actually work unless all of your friends work at Google.
      • jonknee 14y ago
        The social aspects I assume? Personalization absolutely works as it brings up a map of all the pizza places closest to me. Your search shows all the places closest to you.
• monsterix 14y ago
  Looks like head-on with Google, and then why not? The results are specific to a user and his/her taste or surroundings. Something that Google also tries to achieve using history. Would love to give it a sping. Waitlisted, uh.
• alaskamiller 14y ago
  This is pretty futuristic, it's SQL for non-techies that pulls from Facebook data. The most inquisitive, but not enough to be a programmer and deal with FQL and code, will find this really useful since they can finally make use of all the objects they've acted upon and entities they've acted with. It makes Facebook data actually... purposeful. The next step is still to match purpose with intent to make that money.
  • businessleads 14y ago
    Our startup is very excited about this part, since we let people earn bounties based on the intelligent connections they can make between people they know and a business offering a particular service or deal. We are curious whether it will be open enough for us to suggest or run searches for an authenticated user to suggest who they should share a particular offer with.
    • alaskamiller 14y ago
      I don't doubt they open it to their platform but at the same time... remember what happened to people playing on Microsoft's Windows platform in the 80's/90's. And from the scuttlebutt I've heard about dealing with FB execs, they're much better at analyzing data, have clout, leverage, money, power, traffic, so it's hard to deal.
      • businessleads 14y ago
        I would not recommend anyone pin their entire business model on this; but it certainly comes at a nice time for some companies.
    • fudged71 14y ago
      That's a fantastic idea!
      • businessleads 14y ago
        Thank you!
• karpathy 14y ago
  Imo, this is a very smart move if the execution lives up. It gives an incentive to put up even more (structured) information to Facebook, such as Likes/people tags/etc., because now there is a more permanent point to it: it can be discovered by someone much later and become useful and interesting, as opposed to it being interesting merely up to a day on the News Feed and then disappearing forever somewhere deep in your timeline. In other words, it makes building your profile feel additive and even useful.
  • notahacker 14y ago
    The marketing value of a Facebook like just soared. I feel like a Luddite for it incentivising me to remove stuff from a wall I want to be a place for actually interested friends to check out my photos and not a collection of metadata for marketers
    • taliesinb 14y ago
      Wouldn't it be neat if there was an "anonymous like" that you could use for the benefit of your friends and yourself, but that would be prevented from being revealed in a way that was traceable directly to you? I.e. differential privacy for the facebook crowd. For me, the potential negatives of leaving a very precise data shadow for marketers and state actors to remember for all time often outweigh any potential benefits, for a whole range of 'codify yourself' opportunities even outside Facebook (e.g. GoodReads, Amazon Wishlist, YouTube subscriptions, etc).
      • businessleads 14y ago
        "Anonymous like" #featuresyouwillnevereversee
  • fudged71 14y ago
    "What music did my dad listen to when he was my age?" BOOM.
• monkeyfacebag 14y ago
  Graph Search seems like strange branding to me. I almost didn't click the link because I thought "Graph Search" was a new API and not a user-facing product (to be fair, the context was a posting on HN so I was predisposed to think API). Graph Search's real focus appears to be on the use of natural language and the presentation of/interaction with data. The "Graph" is almost the least interesting about it.
  • taliesinb 14y ago
    Yeah, I agree the branding is odd. To most people, graph still means a dimly remembered plot of sin(x) rather than, you know, a network. Of course OpenGraph wasn't either open or a graph, but then that was a developer product.
  • thechut 14y ago
    Is it called that because it is leveraging many feature from the OpenGraph API? Could I accomplish similar things with the API?
    • andrethegiant 14y ago
      I think they chose the name as an homage to the name of how the data is represented from an engineering standpoint. A graph is a data structure that has many nodes connected together. In this case, a node is a person, photo, location, etc, and the edges represent how they are related to each other.
  • snprbob86 14y ago
    I don't think that branding is for users. I think users will always just see "Facebook Search" when this is eventually rolled out broadly. The "Graph" part of "Graph Search" is for us geeks and for Wall Street. The idea is to obviously differentiate this against Google's "Web Search", "Image Search", and other Thing-Searches.
  • fudged71 14y ago
    I agree, this is a terrible name. Their executives don't go outside enough. "Graph Search" means precisely nothing to the average joe.
• togasystems 14y ago
  Crazy.. I developed a Facebook Graph search about a year ago using FQL queries. It works very similarly to how Facebook implemented their Graph Search. I even put a voice recognizer on top of it. Glad to know that my crazy ideas aren't so crazy after all :) Link to demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ge1mH6xqSQc http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=g...
  • pmtarantino 14y ago
    Release it as open source and BOOM :D
    • togasystems 14y ago
      I might... It would need a big clean, but what personal project doesn't?
      • pmtarantino 14y ago
        Or not. Doesn't be ashame, it works great (or at least it seems to work great). Meanwhile, upload to any server to give it a try. I really want to test it, and I think it should receive more buzz ;)
  • septerr 14y ago
    You should upload the app somewhere and make it available. It seems very cool.
  • kamilafsar 14y ago
    What library did you use for speech-to-text? Looks like it's working great..
    • togasystems 14y ago
      I used MIT WAMI http://wami.csail.mit.edu/ http://wami.csail.mit.edu/
  • 14y ago
• cbrsch 14y ago
  Graph Search in one sentence (based on what I see it as): Search built around friends, not links.
• ericmsimons 14y ago
  I don't quite see how this is big competition for Google (yet). Facebook GS can return me more data about my friends than Google can, but Google can return more results for general information. These seem very different from one another.
• state 14y ago
  This is exactly what one would hope from a huge structured data set.
• daigoba66 14y ago
  So it's just building custom queries? I guess it's novel that you can save the queries and see it as a "feed".
• emehrkay 14y ago
  Looks cool, but what is the fallout? Will Google force feed us + a bit more so that they can match/better these types of search results. I need to permanently move to DuckDuckGo
• taliesinb 14y ago
  This bears much more resemblance to Wolfram|Alpha than it does to Google Search. Glad to see natural language interfaces are finally going mainstream.
  • jaydz 14y ago
    The example queries remind me of Prolog.
    • taliesinb 14y ago
      Well, not in terms of syntax :). No, I think they're probably doing proper natural language parsing, and from there hand-coded translation to (their internal version of) FQL. I wonder how flexible their grammar is. It'll be pretty easy to reverse engineer the techniques they are using by looking at failure modes of parses and how intelligently they correct fall-throughs.
    • mturmon 14y ago
      ...in the sense that it is: query is term1(person) & term2(person) & term3(person) ... i.e. query :- term1(p), term2(p), term3(p)
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• juiceandjuice 14y ago
  So basically facebook is what facebook was 7 years ago when you could click on a word in a profile and find out everyone else in your (college) network that also had that listed. I'm glad they brought back functionality they removed forever ago.
  • hresult 14y ago
    +1
• ojr 14y ago
  It will not compete with my google searches, I usually search for wikipedia articles, homework questions, and programming tutorials/help... Seeing people with similar interest is cool but I already do that with meetup.com (very nice in Boston). I am just out of touch with most of facebook target audience? I guess so.
• simonsarris 14y ago
  This is an important step for Facebook and I'm surprised no one has really mentioned it (all ~50 comments so far are about the graph search). The big thing here isn't graph search, or the fancy searching per se. The big thing here is this: > "and meet new people, too." This is huge. Huge! Facebook from the start was envisioned as a sort-of dating platform but that part of it got swept under the rug real quick. Throughout Facebook's history meeting people with Facebook has been a slim thing. Typically it was always one way: Meet in real life -> Add on facebook. It's only a matter of time until Facebook tries to make it the other way around. It seems they're explicitly avoiding the "dating" route, which may or may not be wise (dating sides have some weird connotations among some groups of people). It looks like they've finally found their solution. The amazing thing here isn't Graph. It's that Facebook is going to change its paradigm so that meeting new people is a viable goal of going on Facebook. So eventually we'll be meeting people through Facebook, starting with meetup.com style interests. That's big.
  • shmerl 14y ago
    That's where other social networks differ. On Diaspora for example one probably doesn't know anyone after joining, and you always meet new people. You follow interests, subjects and conversations, not your acquaintances from real life. So it may be "big" for Facebook, but it's routine for other networks.
    • Le_SDT 14y ago
      It might be a routine for others but the big thing here is that facebook found a way to do it and there are a LOT of people already on facebook. That will then make facebook the biggest and most efficient site for this feature.
      • shmerl 14y ago
        Hashtags work for that quite successfully (in Twitter and Diaspora). I'm not sure how well will these graphs work in comparison, but it's better than nothing for Facebook.
  • 14y ago
• priley 14y ago
  Pretty awesome that Facebook could pull this off so quickly. I literally said that exact line to Lars (who lead the search team) during our meetings last year... I can't believe he reused verbatim in the video: "Facebook is for the all the people you know... Ark is for all the people you should know".
  • viraj_shah 14y ago
    You're right, he does highlight the distinction between people you know and people you should know. I instantly thought of Ark when hearing about this. I'd like to see how they and Ark might facilitate those connections once you've identified them. If I'm traveling abroad and meet someone from the same small town, I don't know how inclined I'll be to message them. Not to mention, those messages in Facebook get lost in the "Others" section where I've heard countless stories of people discovering important messages months later.
• shock-value 14y ago
  Some of the examples in the promo videos are pretty far-fetched. I mean, does anyone really give Facebook any information about which dentist he or she goes to? I've never even seen a post from someone talking about going to the dentist, let alone including the dentist's actual name!
  • mjmahone17 14y ago
    No, but if lots of people who aren't associated with you have liked a specific dentist, then that dentist would be top of the search for dentists in your town. One of the side effects of people actually using graphsearch would be that businesses need to have more likes than their competitors, to enhance their FB SEO. Therefore, we'll likely see even more FB ads for nearby businesses trying to get you to like their page.
    • shock-value 14y ago
      You touch on a related point... ranking a business by number of likes is pretty useless. Facebook is going to have to introduce some kind of point rating system like Yelp or Netflix for this to be useful at all.
  • codva 14y ago
    I recently recommended a dentist to a friend - in a thread on his FB wall. So yes, it happens.
• faramarz 14y ago
  Very cool! Can't say much else until I try it. I have a large number of conservative friends who have enabled every privacy setting and provide minimal meta-data, so I already know it won't be as the PR video depicts. Anyway, This reminds me of of the Google+ search by www.findpeopleonplus.com
• trendspotter 14y ago
  The video created by Facebook that explains their new "Graph Search" feature. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10200156514653891 https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10200156514653891
• aganek 14y ago
  I think this a big deal. The first step to a Yelp killer? Type in "Italian Restaurant" and get back list of all the restaurants your friends have checked into. A recommendation engine. For now, its mostly to filter your facebook data. But do you think it can expand and become the goto search engine, ala google?
  • state_machine 14y ago
    You're describing foursquare.
    • aganek 14y ago
      Yes. A better comparison.
  • isameer 14y ago
    Agree. There are a large class of Facebook applications that are really UIs slapped on top of graph search queries. I guess this would get really interesting in a practical sense once Facebook opens up an API for these queries.
  • shock-value 14y ago
    It could maybe work if they do it like Netflix: build a profile of you based on what you have rated highly, and put you in a pool with similar people (friends or otherwise), thus providing more accurate recommendations. But I think Facebook overhypes how much people care about their friend's preferences, at least for most things. We generally don't pick friends based on how closely their shopping/eating/whatever habits match ours.
    • pico303 14y ago
      At my company we've been arguing this same point for years. It doesn't matter what your friends like; it matters what people with similar interests like. Rarely are your friends and family a reflection of all of your likes and dislikes. I'm sure some psychologist could point out the low probability of forming friendships with people who are exactly like you. It seems like Facebook and other social networks took the idea of asking your friends for a recommendation on a good doctor or auto shop and twisted it into some overly simplified premise that if one friend likes something, all of my friends will like it too.
• jonmc12 14y ago
  Interesting to compare against Path (they announced search on 12/20 - http://www.wired.com/business/2012/12/path-social-archive/ http://www.wired.com/business/2012/12/path-social-archive/): Path: search personal events; discovery via proximity (nearby) Facebook: search graph events; discovery via common interest Seems like facebook trying to hone in on cases like dating (discovering people with common interests), and interest discovery (ie, restaurants that others like). Path seems more about making most of personal time (creating life events) in the context of a social environment.
  • NathanKP 14y ago
    It seems like Facebook graph search has a lot more functionality, or maybe I just can't discover how to do everything that Path can do with search. I did discover that it can do delightfully strange things like if you search for "snow" it finds all the moments that happened when it was snowing, even if the moment does not have the word "snow" in it. So it must link location and weather history with moments, which is pretty cool! So Path has a lot of potential. I think the search interface just needs some work to expose more functionality like Facebook is.
• Irregardless 14y ago
  Great, now I have even more reason to stop tagging friends, like fewer things, tighten my privacy restrictions, and tell friends to stop tagging me or checking me in to places. I have no interest in my personal info being used for their search engine, nor do I want friends of friends (i.e. strangers) to contact me just because I like the same TV show or went to their favorite restaurant.
  • andrewmunn 14y ago
    If you don't want friends of friends seeing stuff, why don't you just set your privacy to friend's only?
    • bunkat 14y ago
      This doesn't actually help since your friends control a lot of your privacy. Remember when Mark's sister's photo ended up on Twitter? She had her privacy set to friend's only... It also doesn't prevent friends from tagging you in photos or signing you in places.
      • businessleads 14y ago
        She tagged her sister and her sister's friend tweeted it. Not the same.
    • Irregardless 14y ago
      You can't control your friends' privacy settings. If they tag you in something and have their own privacy settings wide open, anyone will be able to see it.
      • bulltale 14y ago
        From what I recall you can stop friends from tagging you in photos on FB.
        • Leynos 14y ago
• guptaneil 14y ago
  For a company that claims to understand the importance of mobile, why are the videos still in Flash? There is absolutely no reason they couldn't have used HTML5 with Flash fallback here.
  • jay_kyburz 14y ago
    I just watched them on an iPad. Perhaps it's The other way round?
    • guptaneil 14y ago
      Really? I tried viewing from an iPad and saw the following message: https://tabuleapp.com/u/files/image_135827900654910.jpg https://tabuleapp.com/u/files/image_135827900654910.jpg
• mtkd 14y ago
  A new API to see what people build before acquiring first couple of apps and throttling access? Being able to weight my Google results with demographic or social graph attributes would be more useful for me - especially with purchases. 'restaurants in 10km range popular with 30-40 age professionals' 'most popular cookery books up to 3rd degree connections' 'top movies my close friends watched last week'
• ihsw 14y ago
  Interestingly Facebook's recent "Facebook Global University Hackathon" was won[1] by students who also utilized natural language processing. Here is the previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4871854 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4871854 [1] http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/news/facebook-hackathon http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/news/facebook-hackathon
• sek 14y ago
  1. Weird marketing, the word "Graph" doesn't mean anything to average people. Just call it "Facebook Search". Also these cold hyper emotional sounds kinda turn me off, even Apple has more friendly ads. Did they steal the music from some apocalyptic space movie trailer? 2. Interesting problem, to make all that data available to natural search queries. Definitely an attack on Google who still can't really answer natural queries what Marissa Mayer was talking about ages ago. 3. There is just stuff from Facebook what I think is problematic because people don't share everything on Facebook. If they can expand it onto the whole web, it would be a game changer, but also way more difficult to solve. 4. I can't think of a query I would use this for other than testing it. If I search for Apple, I want to the Apple website. So I think this is more a solution on the search for a problem. Maybe they figure that out when it's out there.
  • glomph 14y ago
    >The word "Grap" doesn't mean anything to average people. You can say that again!
    • sek 14y ago
      I swear that was unintentional, fortunately I could still edit it XD
  • 27182818284 14y ago
    I think the reasoning for "Graph" is that social "network" and "search" have been used and abused too much. They don't want you thinking graph theory algorithms, but they will borrow from graph theory to have a new word.
• aganek 14y ago
  Big! Search will fit seamlessly in the Facebook experience. I bet we soon forget that Facebook didn't always have this function.
• pokefunat 14y ago
  Their front page demonstration has an error. http://imgur.com/J7r73 http://imgur.com/J7r73
• zaidf 14y ago
  I have a feeling this is more to announce facebook's intent to compete in search than a product they actually expect people to use. Really it sounds like a precursor to facebook's google competitor.
• erick23 14y ago
  live Mark Zuckerberg http://live.theverge.com/facebook-see-what-were-building-event/ http://live.theverge.com/facebook-see-what-were-building-eve...
• sophiabatka464 14y ago
  A Haunted House 2013 is a very nice movie.Malcolm and Keisha move into their castle in the sky internal, but soon study a evil spirit in addition resides present. At what time Kisha becomes possessed, Malcolm – resolute to keep his gender life on track – turns to a priest, a spiritual, and a team of ghost-busters on behalf of help. http://freemoviesite24.com/2013/01/a-haunted-house-2013-free-movie-download http://freemoviesite24.com/2013/01/a-haunted-house-2013-free... http://freemoviesite24.com/2013/01/a-haunted-house-2013-free-movie-download http://freemoviesite24.com/2013/01/a-haunted-house-2013-free... http://freemoviesite24.com/2013/01/a-haunted-house-2013-free-movie-download http://freemoviesite24.com/2013/01/a-haunted-house-2013-free... http://freemoviesite24.com/2013/01/a-haunted-house-2013-free-movie-download http://freemoviesite24.com/2013/01/a-haunted-house-2013-free... http://freemoviesite24.com/2013/01/a-haunted-house-2013-free-movie-download http://freemoviesite24.com/2013/01/a-haunted-house-2013-free...
• tferris 14y ago
  This product doesn't make sense at all. I can just query useless data from my peer group or the friends of friends group. Data which I already know and not care about. But I cannot ask the really interesting questions about all Facebook users: "Show me all female singles nearby with at least 30 profile photos each" "Show me all female singles nearby which love to chat and respond messages within 2 hours on average." "Show all females within one mile and poke them all automatically" This thing is as it is half-baked: the name, the product, just everything -- far away from being "huge". BTW, those kind of looking-for-female-singles-in-my-city-queries were very easy in FB's early days for quite a long time. Then, I poked them all in my city and got a conversion (poke2reply) of about 1:15.
  • RyanZAG 14y ago
    By that description, it sounds like Facebook did a good move in restricting this, as well as removing the ability to do it awhile back. Seriously, females are human too.
  • berlinbrown 14y ago
    That is how I feel. Facebook is a bastardization of technology. We should focus on secure, anonymous approaches. Not stalking applications. That is why no one created Facebook. Because personal information and the like should be protected. Facebook goes the opposite direction.
• joshstrange 14y ago
  Am I missing something? The query, at one point, is "People who like Cycling and live in Seattle, Washington" yet the 2nd person "card" clearly states they live in San Francisco, California. Pic: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2148004/Screenshots/~-mm.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2148004/Screenshots/~-mm.png
  • zdrtx 14y ago
    It's just a mistake in the demo video...
• Apocryphon 14y ago
  I'm curious as to the political implications of this, given social media's increasing presence in recent civil uprisings and government monitoring.
  • beatpanda 14y ago
    That ship already sailed. Facebook cooperates pretty extensively with law enforcement, so while they're announcing a nice, friendly consumer interface, law enforcement already has way more data than you'll have access to through this feature.
• minimaxir 14y ago
  My first Graph Search will be: Find people on Facebook whose first name begins with Robert'); DROP TABLE users;--
  • joelthelion 14y ago
    Be careful. You might face 35 years in prison :-/
    • sergiotapia 14y ago
      Too soon, man; too soon.
  • paul_f 14y ago
    Why would you do that to little Bobby Tables? Think of the children, man
• gfodor 14y ago
  They're going to have the same problem wolfram alpha has, since in the space of "all queries" only a tiny, tiny fraction of them are going to be ones that Facebook can resolve. Now, it might be less of a practical problem since the use cases for FB search are pretty clear and obvious, unlike W|A. But it doesn't sound like this is an open-ended search engine. Imagine typing say "shoes for sale on amazon" and getting "Sorry, Facebook doesn't know how to answer this query." It will quickly pigeon hole the product. Also, similar to W|A, there is value in the queries themselves since they are mini-algorithms. If someone comes up with a clever query to get FB to say, find me people who I actually might want to hire, it could be valuable. I really hope they build an API on top of this so that startups can build products around novel queries.
  • dgregd 14y ago
    > tiny fraction of them are going to be ones that Facebook can resolve maybe the rest they are going to forward/proxy to Bing.
    • gfodor 14y ago
      Didn't think of that! Would be a really smart move.
    • sonier 14y ago
      Interesting, I wonder how many people would start using this as there only search engine.
      • mark_l_watson 14y ago
        That is FB's plan :-) Not a bad idea. Perform a search, highest ranked results are for friend's content, then fall through to Bing results. The Bing search API (from Azure marketplace) which I use from Clojure and Ruby applications yields good results and since Google no longer offers search APIs, Microsoft gets that business.
        • fudged71 14y ago
• not_that_noob 14y ago
  This is Facebook trying to become Google. +1 for ambition. But lousy product and mostly meh. It's not a Google killer. People go to Google to search for lots of stuff they want to know more about. Movies, sports, homework, whatever. And when they need that particular mouthwash, where do they think of first? Google. And thus the power of AdWords. The habit of general searching causes you to turn to Google when you're seeking a product. Mark Z is smart, and recognizes this dynamic. So he's trying to create a destination for your search queries. The problem for him is that people already have a habit he needs to break. And what he's offering as an incentive to break it is pretty weak tea. How often will the average user (grandma in Peoria) turn to Graph Search? Not often enough to break her Google habit. +1 for effort and ambition - but I doubt this is going to be much more than hype.
• bernardom 14y ago
  Looking at this from a different angle: it seems new to me to see Mark Zuckerberg doing an announcement of a new feature. The video at the bottom reminded me of an Apple ad (toned down and without Jony Ive's accent). I wonder if this is part of a new strategy of pushing him out to the public a little bit more.
• rickymm3 14y ago
  would just like to point out: Google started moving towards a more social experience from search engine by adding google plus. Facebook started move towards a search engine from social experience by adding graph search. They are definitely lined up to converge at a giant battleground, both coming from opposite sides of the spectrum. Both will come with different strengths, however, Google's integration of its plus network is FAR superior, both technically, and in the sense of having a plan. Whether we use it or not, it is already stealing data from us, even if we dont know it. IMO, google has no adversaries. FB is doing this for the fun of it.
• stevewilhelm 14y ago
  I voted up this article because I just wanted to read something technical on HN.
• tambourine_man 14y ago
  Facebook is one of the few things in this 'ideologyless' world that really makes my blood boil. From the promo video: -The world feels smaller… Yes, I joined the freaking World Wide Web to narrow my world view. -On Facebook, when two people make the same search, they get completely different results! That's a feature? People can't freaking decide where they wan't to eat or go to the movies for themselves? What's maddening to me is that we are allowing someone like Zuckerberg, who obviously has many talents, but making friends is not one of them, direct our social lives. The sad thing is that it's getting harder and harder to ignore it, from work to friends. I fear that someday I might be forced to join this freakshow.
• khmel 14y ago
  FB search as it is not capable to become kickass end-user-oriented product yet, it's more like a set of technologies that could be used by app developers to create cool dating\hiring\recommendation services and widgets using real-time api requests. The best apps will be acquired by Fb or just copied :)
• plg 14y ago
  Honest question: why would I want to ask Facebook a question about my friends, when I can just ... ask my friends?
• beatpanda 14y ago
  "Everyone on Facebook who isn't blocked by you can search for you, but what they can see in search results about you depends on what's shared with them. Search results respect your privacy settings, whether it's info you’ve shared, or posts with tags of you that others have shared." My Facebook profile is currently set to not be visible in search, because I don't want people who I didn't explicitly give my Facebook link to be able to find me. Will Facebook continue to respect this setting?
• ya3r 14y ago
  Two things: - "The interface fundamentally determines the behavior" and this thing has a real great interface. I just don't see how this could be integrated into the facebook home screen (newsfeed). - I wonder how long does it take google to copycat this thing.
• confluence 14y ago
  Oh so they finally noticed Quora and Google+. Good on them. Interest based social networks will replace the hodge podge of specialty forums using anonymous names you see all over the web.
  • martinced 14y ago
    I'm really not sure about that... There are lots of forums (guns, cars, gambling, I.T. security, ...) where people are very careful about what they post. I think, on the contrary, that with all that push by FaceBook and G+ to try to reduce your anonimity more and more we'll see more and more specialized forum putting an emphasis on anonimity. I even believe there's a wide open door for a pseudonymous social network. One where people really know each other (you can only add if you know the person in real life) but where it is specifically forbidden to use any real name.
• hresult 14y ago
  Facebook's intent is really obvious - they are trying to replace "raw" Internet with the Facebook layer, and people would do all interactions: social, searches, shopping through their layer. This would render other companies like Google, Yelp, you name it obsolete. The problem however is in the details: how can anyone trust Facebook with their private data, searches etc. considering all the privacy issues, lack of user's control over their data, etc.? Once you're in the Matrix, you cannot unplug. That's what Facebook is trying to bring to the users.
• jblow 14y ago
  I don't understand why people think this is going to be useful. The inbuilt assumption is that people care enough about the data to want to search it frequently and thoroughly. I don't think that is true. Facebook is mostly ephemeral junk data that you don't care about; this has been true ever since they changed their UI to the Twitter-style "what are you thinking right now?" input / streaming. In order for search to be useful they first have to backtrack heavily on what their entire platform is about. Which would be hard.
• mathattack 14y ago
  Wow. There are a lot of interpretations on why this is HUGE - a game changer. In addition to what's been mentioned above, this is the shot across the bow of Google. I suspect Google has better search, but their social graph is much worse. (Google+ is only extensively used by their captive audience) The search on Facebook will get better over time, and they have the better social graph. This also gives them a new "neat" factor that will keep people coming back, especially those bored of seeing cat and children photos from long forgotten friends.
• randomchars 14y ago
  I wonder if searching for "Single friends of friends" would work. Optionally with "who like x".
• jaimebuelta 14y ago
  Am I the only one that doesn't usually click on "like' things? I mean things like 'dancing', 'outdoors' or 'Game Of Thrones'. Even if I like them. First, because I don't think one day "hey, I like dancing, so I think I should state it on Facebook so everyone knows!" And second, because most of the times, liking something gets your timeline full of useless updates. Not sure if is something that adds real value for users. We'll see...
  • mjmahone17 14y ago
    Well, part of the reason they designed their search this way is probably to encourage people to like more things. Because now when you like things, you're also helping out your friends, by giving them a recommendation some time in the future. If Facebook advertised that bit in some way, or just if they design the user experience right so that you continue to be encouraged to like things or enhance your profile, then they should be able to adjust user behavior a bit.
  • karpathy 14y ago
    I was thinking the same things, but I just took about half hour to map out my books/tvshows/movies/sports/activities and enter them all because they are now potentially searchable. For example, if one of my friends also read a book I liked, that's something I'd be happy to know.
    • jaimebuelta 14y ago
      Yes, but, do you think that is something that you'll keep doing? The main idea is that Facebook keeps track of all that information, and you have to feed it. It is possible that FB will "capture" status messages to add to that information. E.g. saying something like "Great Game Of Thrones show today!" will get converted into "like GoT", but it can be difficult, as there are a lot of info that you don't usually comment on Facebook. How many books did you read in your life? Are you listing them all in FB? I think that anything that needs specific "maintenance" can be difficult to keep up-to-date in the long run, and you'll end with people that liked a group for a couple of years and got tired of, etc...
• loudin 14y ago
  All the people who support this keep saying how everyone else is going to use the tool to do x, y, or z, but they haven't said what they themselves would do with it. So I ask, when you have access to Graph Search, what is the first thing you'll do with it?
• marknutter 14y ago
  Here's what Facebook doesn't get. I have 580 friends on Facebook. These are all people I've met in real life at least once. I care, honestly, about maybe 50 of them. And of those I care about, I want to know what's going on in maybe 10 of those 50 friends' lives. Ask my how much I care about people who aren't friends with me on Facebook. About as much as I care about anybody on the internet on any site.
  • lesinski 14y ago
    Actually, that's what's great about Facebook: they probably already know who those 10-50 friends are based on your activity on the site, your location, your photos. They know your best friends based on your actions versus who you might list if they asked you who your best friends are -- which might be a more accurate way of figuring it out anyway.
    • angryasian 14y ago
      yeah but out of those 50 you may only want 10 that are knowledgeable about food, and in the greater 500 list you may want 10 that are knowledgeable about tech. Just because you're close to someone doesn't you mean you value their opinion as highly on every subject.
      • mturmon 14y ago
        Especially as you get older, and your friendships diversify.
  • trustfundbaby 14y ago
    Which is why they're working on a more intelligent feed http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerbergs-right-hand-man-is-working-on-a-secret-project-to-change-how-you-gets-your-tv-news-and-music-2013-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerbergs-right-hand-m...
• 37prime 14y ago
  Yet another reason to abandon Facebook. It is getting creepy and creepier.
• orangethirty 14y ago
  If only I could buy a developer account so I did not have to be a Facebook user to integrate with them.
• wildmXranat 14y ago
  Facebook, Please consider adding the following clause to all queries: AND WHERE deleted_at IS NULL OR deleted_at = '' OR private = '' I like the idea of having a query language for facebook data. I just don't like the idea of having any of my things come up in any search. And yes, I quit FB a long time ago, but my spidey sense is tingling that FB didn't quit on my data.
• ececconi 14y ago
  The major trend of Facebook is that it is making the world smaller by making the people you interact with a smaller bubble. This may be a very good thing. Sometimes, though, it makes me feel like we're carrying out a new type of social hierarchy by only interacting with people we are like and are friends of friends with.
• cfqycwz 14y ago
  I think this has really interesting consequences in combination with the "pay money to send messages to people you aren't friends with" feature Facebook's been testing lately. That's the revenue potential I immediately saw in this product with the demo search for "people who like cycling in my hometown"--you can find them for free, but it will cost you to contact (or direct market to) them.
• plg 14y ago
  problems: 1. it treats data from all friends (presumably) equally. Presumably in real life you weigh opinions of different friends differently. 2. search can only take place on information that your friends are willing to share publicly (or at least with all their "friends"). Presumably in real life opinions you get from people you know will be way different if they know it is a private exchange. 3. isn't this all a bit high on the autism spectrum? The idea that to find out information about the likes and dislikes of your "friends", you log onto a computer and do what amounts to a database search, rather than just ASK YOUR FRIENDS ???
  • exodust 14y ago
    Good points. With number 3, if you just ask your friends, there's no chance for advertisers to get involved in that transaction. Facebook is a business where the things you express to friends and family are the currency with which you pay for the service. "Free and always will be" is a lie when factoring in your personal views, information, recommendations, and content are the currency used. You can always leave FB, but you'll be losing connections you depend on for emotional and social reasons. Facebook knows this, that's why they have you by the balls. As an outsider, I'm seeing a new wave of business-reliance on FB which will mean the FB logo spreading to every shop, ad, website etc. From the local bakery to bike shop, "Find us on Facebook" posters clumsily displayed in big fat graphics. More than ever, I'm not interested in joining. This new business-reliance will alienate those who joined to connect with people. Future generations hopefully won't tolerate such a blatant sellout of personal connections, a stupid hi-jacking of the word "like" - which once belonged to people who liked things. Marketing and search engines don't belong as an invisible force underlying your communications with close friends or family. That is so wrong it's poisonous. Zuckerberg said it best: "dumb f--ks".
• jskonhovd 14y ago
  This creeps me out more than anything. I already know where I like to hang out and who my friends are... I go to freenode.
• sidcool 14y ago
  Whatever the positives or negatives, the tech behind this effort would be super duper cool.
• pseut 14y ago
  So... it's either algorithmic stalking or it's nothing that new, right? I'm going for algorithmic stalking. Now, to really be effective, I guess they're going to have to add "graph alerts" so one can get notified when (totally hypothetically), any friend of a friend living in the same city with more than n friends (to screen out the losers; replace n with your own threshold) changes her relationship status to "single". Or I guess one can just keep a saved search/smart folder of "prospects" (stalkees?) that can be "checked in" on from time to time; maybe set up a mobile alert that pings you whenever one of them is in/near your neighborhood. So, I can see why advertisers or businesses might like this, and I can see why grudge-holding exes might like this, but I can't really see why I would want to be stalked. Thank god Facebook has such transparent and persistent privacy settings, or I'd really worry! (yes, this is over the top)
• egfx 14y ago
  one question. Any cool new changes to the Graph API? Doesn't look like it.
• lmm 14y ago
  Everything old is new again. Back in `05, the facebook would let you search for people by interest, or age, or sex. Can't imagine why they stopped that.