01/16/2013, 19:47:23

Mark Zuckerberg during the presentation of Graph Search. Photo: Robert Galbraith/Reuters

Gives an answer, not a link

Facebook introduced "social search"

On January 15, the social network Facebook introduced “social search” (Graph search), a new feature that will allow you to search through content published by users. The management of the social network has high hopes for the innovation, calling it one of the three - along with the friend feed and the "chronicle" - pillars on which Facebook will rest.

“Social Search” searches for almost everything that is on Facebook - by people, their interests, events from their lives reflected on the social network, photos, “likes” and so on. The wording entered into the built-in search engine is more like a set of filters written in “human” language than a search query in some Google. On January 15, the head of the social network, Mark Zuckerberg, also spoke about the differences between the “traditional” search engine and the new Facebook function. He noted that search engines only provide links to answers, while “social search” will provide answers immediately in the search results.

About promotions

From September to December 2012, Facebook shares, which had collapsed after the IPO, began to rise. At the beginning of 2013, Facebook shares grew even more - at the beginning of trading on March 14, one security was already worth more than $32. In other words, Facebook shares came so close to the offering price for the first time, which was $38. At the same time, there was no news indicating a sharp increase in Facebook’s financial performance, and almost all analytical reports on this stock said that the social network was growing “on rumors” - investors expected that at the press conference On January 15th, the network will unveil something indicating that the company has finally found a good way to monetize its traffic.

Judging by the movement of Facebook shares on January 15, investors were disappointed in the new social network. At the end of the trading session, securities of Mark Zuckerberg's company fell by 2.74 percent, and as the day progressed they fell by more than three percent. Apparently, the local maximum for securities has been passed, and Facebook needs some other new product for the shares to reach the price established as part of the IPO.

“Social search” as such is not yet available to users: on one page they can apply to participate in closed beta testing, and on another they can try three options for using the new function: “People living in my city”, “Photos of my friends” and “Restaurants my friends have been to.”

In fact, there are many more options. Facebook itself divides them into four categories depending on the type of response: people, photos, places and interests (the last item includes music, videos, books and other content that the user has reported consuming on their page).

Filters used when searching on Facebook can be combined: the user will be able to search not just for “restaurants in New York,” but specifically for those where his “friends” were, and not all of them, but only those who ski and listen to Coldplay . Not just photographs, but those that were taken in Paris. Not just any books, but only those that Microsoft employees liked.

At the same time, Facebook will sort the results (if any) by how “close” this or that “friend” is to you: the more interaction you have had with him before, the higher the answer associated with him will appear in the search results. If we are talking about outside users, then, for example, the number of mutual friends will matter. The social network vows not to reveal information hidden by privacy settings in searches.

Facebook hopes that the new tool will find wide application (it’s not for nothing that it was called the third “pillar”). For example, users will be able to search through “social search” for new acquaintances, companies for potential employees, and journalists for newsmakers. Company employee Vadim Lavrusik wrote a separate post about how useful the new feature is for journalists. In addition to the aforementioned search for newsmakers (“an employee of company X, living in New York”), the innovation will help you find photos from the scene and the interests of certain user groups (“books of interest to journalists”). The latter, apparently, should appeal to fans of various social studies.

Unfortunately, neither the Facebook presentation nor Lavrusik’s text says anything about a simple but important tool for journalists: searching the text of posts. The ability to find posts on a specific topic on Twitter often allows you to create a picture of the incident or find eyewitnesses of the event. A similar function on Facebook, which is still available today, works very poorly. Apparently, there are no plans to focus on text search in the near future.

But the social network decided to enter the field of “traditional” search engines by introducing Bing search (developed by Microsoft) onto its pages. Soon a user will be able to search for information on the Internet without leaving the social network. As they write in Bing, the results will be “mixed”: under the links to the pages found on third-party resources, the number of “likes” that Facebook users have given them will be indicated. And on the right side of the page there will be a block with search results for public pages and social network applications.

If we return to the “social search” presented on January 15, Zuckerberg managed to both surprise and disappoint journalists. On the one hand, content search is only one of nine innovations that journalists were expecting from the presentation in Palo Alto. The fact is that Facebook very rarely holds events at its head office, so there were hopes that Zuckerberg would show off many impressive new products at once, including the mythical “Facebook Phone.”

Screenshot: Facebook Graph Search

On the other hand, “social search” is not just a search, but a tool that is quite capable of bringing Facebook closer to the position of a “harvester”, replacing most specialized recommendation services (be it Last.fm or Foursquare). As a Slate columnist writes , the innovation has finally breathed meaning into “liking” pages and products: it will no longer be just useless knowledge that suddenly slipped through the “friend feed”, but full-fledged recommendations received by the user exactly when he needs them.

It cannot be said that Facebook is a pioneer in building a search using a question-answer model that predicts the user’s desires. In 2012, Google actively introduced an encyclopedic block into its search engine, which contains a brief summary of the object being searched for and which, thereby, immediately provides answers to the most obvious questions. And back in 2011, Apple released the voice assistant Siri, which first tries to give a direct answer, and only in difficult cases sends the user to a search engine.

But neither Google nor Apple yet have the breadth of information about users' interests and activities that Facebook has. The success of the launch of “social search” will determine whether other popular resources will adopt a similar tool, and, consequently, whether the mechanism for searching for information on the Internet will change. True, Russian Facebook users should hardly expect a quick (and, most importantly, high-quality) implementation of the new function: the social network has traditionally had a difficult relationship with the Russian language.

Sultan Suleymanov

Gives an answer, not a link

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