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"Now we know what Facebook is building: a better internal search system.\nSpeaking at a much-hyped event at Facebook HQ, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a raft of improvements to \"graph search\" \u2014 that is, the ability to search within your social graph for specifics.\nThe search improvements involve the ability to ask questions in regular English, such as \"which of my friends live in New York?\" The search is now intelligent enough to rank your friends based on how much interaction you've had \u2014 so that closer friends will appear higher up the results list.\nIt can also search based on stories or photos you've Liked. One example Zuckerberg offered: the site can now display which of his friends have Liked the HBO show Game of Thrones. You can search for people who Like multiple products or services, which seems likely to be a bonanza for marketers.\nPhotos can also be ranked by which have the most Likes, based on the people most important to you in your Friends list. And one of the most useful use cases appears to be searching for local businesses that have received a thumbs-up from friends (and their friends). \nGraph search starts today in beta, and will appear as a large blue search bar at the top of your Facebook page. You can sign up for the beta \u2014 or rather, join the Waiting List for a beta invite \u2014 here.\nZuckerberg was careful to emphasize that Graph Search is a new and limited product. For now, it will focus on four areas: people, photos, places and interests.\nHere's what it looks like:\n\n\"With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: 'my friends in New York who like Jay-Z') to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that's been shared on Facebook,\" wrote product manager Tom Stocky and engineering manager Lars Rasmussen on Facebook's official announcement blog post. \n\"We believe they have very different uses.\"\nThe pair were also careful to assuage privacy concerns:\nWe\u2019ve built Graph Search from the start with privacy in mind, and it respects the privacy and audience of each piece of content on Facebook. It makes finding new things much easier, but you can only see what you could already view elsewhere on Facebook.\nIn cases where it can't find anything useful for you, Graph search will default to a web search \u2014 powered by Facebook's partner, Microsoft's Bing. Zuckerberg reluctantly revealed that negotiations with Google that would have allowed the search giant access to Facebook results had broken down.\nPhoto: Emily Price, Mashable"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/01/15/facebook-graph-search/>