Better pay attention to your privacy controls and turn off that location data! Graph Search, according to Facebook, will be "privacy-aware" -- that is, it will respect the boundaries that you set as to what is shared and what isn't. And yet, on the other hand, it will only work really well if we are promiscuous in what we "like" and willing to share oodles of information about ourselves. Facebook has created a tool that, in effect, pushes us to do more of what Facebook wants us to do -- because, even though there are no plans right now for ads on Graph Search, ultimately Facebook's profits hinge on being able to target us for advertising based on what we tell Facebook about ourselves. And no matter how privacy aware the software engine is, that seems to carry significant privacy implications. Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of "The Googlization of Everything," tweeted that "Graph Search is a stalker's dream." Will single men and women really feel comfortable with their photographs suddenly accessible via Graph Search based on specific hookup-friendly search query terms? ||||| Maybe people got tired of their friends and family over the holidays, or perhaps they resolved to do a digital detox for the New Year. Either way, Facebook has been a bit quieter lately. 
 
 
 
 Shutterstock.com 
 
 The number of Americans using Facebook fell by nearly 1.4 million in early December, according to new data from social media monitoring company SocialBakers. While Facebook /quotes/zigman/9962609/delayed/quotes/nls/fb FB -2.56% has more than 167 million users in the U.S. and 1 billion worldwide, the recent drop in monthly active users is still akin to losing the entire population of San Antonio, Texas. “Facebook is possibly getting to a point where the less engaged part of the audience doesn’t visit every 30 days,” says SocialBakers CEO Jan Rezab. 
 
 Why the fall off? The increased advertising on the site and new experimental fees may be grating on some users’ nerves, experts say. Earlier this month, for example, Facebook tested charging users (with fees peaking at $100 within the U.S.) to send a message to someone outside their “friends” list. And in October, it rolled out the option to promote posts to more friends for a $7 fee. “There seems to be a change every other week,” says K. Jason Krafsky, who co-wrote the book “Facebook and Your Marriage.” 
 
 With a 54% share of the market in the U.S., some tech experts say Facebook’s growth was bound to start slowing. In fact, its market share may actually be closer to 80%, when you remove users under 13 years of age (not allowed by Facebook) and those over 65 (not big social networkers), Rezab says. “For Facebook, we don’t see a massive user growth opportunity driving the company’s financial results,” says Rick Summer, an analyst at Morningstar, so the company will continue pushing new features instead. (Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.) 
 
 Click to Play Will graph search help Facebook grow its business? Dan Gallagher discusses how investors are reacting to graph search and whether it can help grow Facebook's business. 
 
 Of course, people come and go on Facebook, just as they gain and lose interest with anything in real life. “In the New Year, a number of people take a break from social, and others decide it’s a time suck, so remove their accounts all together,” says independent social media analyst Jennifer P. Brown. Brown says six people in her network quit Facebook in 2013 and she herself took a break from social media this month. Brown says she grew tired of the “vitriol” surrounding the current gun-control debate after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. 
 
 “Students and teachers are headed back to school, and they might not need as much of their digital friendships now that they can interact more in person,” says Jason Keath, founder and CEO of SocialFresh.com, a social media training company. Others seem to have given up on Facebook completely. Brian Smith, a San Francisco-based environmental campaigner, for one, deleted his account, choosing instead to use Google+ for sports and international news, and Twitter for politics. “Facebook felt like a never-ending high school reunion,” he says. ||||| At long last, Facebook’s search challenge to Google has arrived. But it has arrived in a much different format than many expected. Indeed, Facebook’s not using its data to provide a better search than Google. Facebook is providing a new type of search that you simply can’t do on Google or anywhere else. 
 
 The Connections Of Links Vs. Likes 
 
 I’ve struggled with how to describe this new service. I hate the term “graph,” whether it’s used by Facebook for “Social Graph” and now for “Facebook Graph Search” or Google for “Knowledge Graph.” To the ordinary person, I feel “graph” is a noise word, saying nothing about how it represents connections between objects. 
 
 With a typical Google search, the objects we search for are Web pages, with the connections (or graph) that help determine the pages that rise to the top primarily being links from across the Web. Links, simple form, are like votes, helping Google decide which are the most popular pages to show for a particular topic. 
 
 With Facebook Graph Search, the objects we search for aren’t Web pages but instead virtual representations of real world objects: people, places and things. The connections are primarily Facebook Likes. Did such-and-such a person like a particular photo? A particular doctor? A particular restaurant? Those likes are the ties that bind the information in Facebook together. 
 
 Multidimensional Searching 
 
 Another difference is the layers of searching or refinement that Facebook Search offers compared to Google. For example, a Google search can show you restaurants in San Francisco, a pretty much single dimensional view. 
 
 A Facebook search can show you restaurants in San Francisco liked by your friends. Or further, those liked by your friends who actually live in San Francisco, as opposed to those who live elsewhere. Or those liked by your single friends, your straight friends, your gay friends, your friends who work for a particular company…. 
 
 Sure, if you drill into Google+ Local, you can get something like this. It’ll offer to show you restaurants liked by your friends or liked by those similar to you. There are other types of refinements that can be done. But you won’t get the incredible myriad of possibilities that Facebook Graph search allows…. 
 
 Restaurants run by employees of a particular cooking school 
 
 Pictures by friends who live in London 
 
 Friends who are friends with people who work for a particular company, say, all the people at Facebook who know people who work at Apple 
 
 Product managers who have turned into company founders 
 
 Movies that your friends like 
 
 The Promise & Challenge 
 
 Will people want to search in these ways, to find all the books liked by two different people, or to find the most popular music liked by those who like both President Barack Obama and Clint Eastwood? At first, I’m sure there will be plenty of curiosity searches like this. But the bigger question will be whether the connections Facebook mines grow substantial enough to give Facebook Graph Search serious utility. 
 
 Need a good plumber? An electrician? Someone to do your taxes? A doctor? A dentist? These are all typically questions that are great to ask friends. You trust friends. With Facebook Graph Search, there’s the promise of asking all your friends this at once without actually having to ask them. You can just search and discover professionals like this that they like. 
 
 That all depends, however, on whether those professionals themselves have created a presence for themselves on Facebook. In turn, it also depends on whether those who use them have also liked them. Without those connections, there’s nothing to mine. 
 
 When I’ve watched Facebook show me demos of Facebook Graph Search, and do some of the example searches I’ve itemized above, it’s impressive. But it’s also impressive because it’s a person from Facebook who makes heavy use on Facebook to connect to things and who is, in turn, tapping into the knowledge of many other Facebookers who are similarly hyper-connected. They are not, in a word, normal. 
 
 Fixing The Disconnected Me 
 
 Consider me. Not only have I not liked my electrician, my plumber, my dentist, my doctor or my tax person on Facebook, but I don’t even know if they have Facebook pages. I have nothing to offer to my Facebook friends in this regard. 
 
 Similarly, despite the huge number of books I read through my Kindle, I never go to like those books on Facebook, so books I love are more or less invisible on Facebook. 
 
 Facebook itself understands this challenge, but it’s hoping the promise of what search can provide will help encourage people to build the connections they may lack now. 
 
 “There are now new reasons to make these connections. We’re hoping the existence of that will encourage it,” said Tom Stocky, director of product management at Facebook, who has worked closely on the Facebook search product. “But absolutely, early on, that [your degree of connectedness] will make the experience you have with this vary.” 
 
 A Better Search For What You Do On Facebook 
 
 If the utility to use Facebook as a type of super-Yelp or super-LinkedIn doesn’t prove itself at first, at the very least, Facebook Graph Search will allow people to search within Facebook itself in a better way than they can now. For example, people will be able to find all the photos they’ve liked on Facebook. 
 
 “This is one of the best queries in the system,” Lars Rasmussen told me, the former Googler that Facebook lured away to be director of engineering, and who’s overseen the Facebook search project. “You probably like a couple of photos a day, but you’ve never been able to see a collection of them before.” 
 
 Facebook’s “Third View” That You Create 
 
 Rasmussen and Stocky expressed Facebook Graph Search as a new, third way that people will view Facebook. They already have their own timeline, to see what’s related to them. They have a newsfeed view, to discover what’s happening with others. Now they have a “search view” to see whatever they like. 
 
 “We’re giving users a way to create whatever view they want,” Stocky said. Or as Rasmussen said, people give a “title” for a page they want with their search queries “and we’re just filling in the content underneath.” 
 
 The new service will be Facebook’s first ever “beta” product and the first ever requiring a waitlist. Over the coming months, it will slowly become more available to those in English and down the line extended to other languages. 
 
 Facebook stresses that only information that a person can regularly see on Facebook will be revealed in search. Given this, there shouldn’t be any privacy surprises. Nothing is being shared beyond the people you already share with. However, I think some people will get surprised, as the new search makes it easier to locate information in ways they weren’t expected, similar to how Timeline did the same, when it launched. 
 
 In a quirk, those who opt into the new service won’t be able to search any longer for posts and status updates that match a particular topic. That’s a future improvement that will come to the new search. But Facebook says the loss shouldn’t be noticed given that this type of search is rarely done, in part because the current search feature for it isn’t very good. That’s what Facebook aims to correct. 
 
 Results are also personalized. If you do a search filtered to see what your friends like, what other people see for their friends is obviously going to be different. But even if you do a general search, say to see the most popular music liked by those in a particular city, there’s a chance that the results you get might be weighted a bit more by your friends, Facebook said. However, for general searches like that, people should see fairly similar answers. 
 
 So, want to see all the TV shows that are liked by software engineers, as an example of that type of general search? “I wouldn’t normally think to search for this anywhere else,” Stocky said, offering up yet another example of what the new Facebook Graph Search promises. 
 
 No, you wouldn’t, because until now, there really was nowhere else to search for that type of thing. That’s the uniqueness that Facebook brings into the search game today. It’ll be interesting to see where people drive it forward. 
 
 See also our related coverage:
– Facebook unveiled its new search tool today even as stats showed that the number of Americans using the site fell by 1.4 million in December, reports MarketWatch. A blip, or did the US hit a saturation point? Maybe it's those new ads and fees? Time will tell, but it's a safe bet that Mark Zuckerberg hopes his new "Graph Search"—lots of reviewers hate the abstract name—will reverse the trend by embedding Facebook further into our lives. The tech press generally seems intrigued, with many taking a wait-and-see approach in reviews. Andrew Leonard at Salon says it "looks like a big deal," with the potential to change the business models of online dating, job searches, and the like. Yelp, Craigslist, and, of course, Google, are surely taking notice. Here's his example of a potential use: "It’s Saturday night in the not too distant future. You walk into a crowded bar. At first glance, you don’t recognize anyone, so you pull out your phone and log into your Facebook app. You tap in a query: Show me the single women (or men) who are in this bar, adore Mozart, Macklemore and the TV show Community and are part of the network defined as 'friends of my Facebook friends.' ... If you’re lucky, Facebook spits back a few profile pics at you, and you’re suddenly ready to buy someone a drink who is already pre-approved for your personal checklist." Full post here. Of course, none of this works unless you and your friends, and their friends, are diligent "likers." Sure, you can theoretically find a dentist recommended by this circle, but how many people "like" their dentist right now? "Consider me," writes Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand. "Not only have I not liked my electrician, my plumber, my dentist, my doctor or my tax person on Facebook but I don’t even know if they have Facebook pages. I have nothing to offer to my Facebook friends in this regard." Facebook understands the challenge, he adds, "but it’s hoping the promise of what search can provide will help encourage people to build the connections they may lack now." Full post here.