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Facebook Announces Social Search Tools
Today at a press conference in California, Mark Zuckerberg announced a big new feature from Facebook: Graph Search. It's a set of tools designed to quickly bring together social information involving "people, photos, places, and interests" in response to a user's query. Zuckerberg was quick to point out that they aren't indexing the web, and thus aren't challenging Google. However, it will use the vast volumes of data already stored on Facebook to answer questions like "What kinds of movies do my friends like?" and "Who are friends of friends that are single in San Francisco?" Addressing the obvious privacy concerns, the company said it wouldn't allow users to search content that wasn't already shared with them (or already public). The searched data does, however, include location data, if it's been shared — you can search by places your friends have been. Significantly, the official site also mentions that Graph Search will help you meet new people, something Facebook hasn't really highlighted until now. Graph Search is being rolled out as a limited beta, with only a few thousand participants. In the coming months, they'll open it to more users and continue working on mobile and non-English versions.
Additional levels of automated stalking!!!
When I've wanted to know what movies my friends like, I'll probably have already talked to them about it.
On Facebook, though, I've got "friends" who are basically just people I shared some period of time and space with - e.g. high school classmates. I don't really care what movies they like, unless they're members of the tiny minority with whom I've kept contact over the decades.
BTW this is the exact same logic that made me immediately turn off Google's "social" search results when they enabled that last year (in a previous attempt to revive the moribund Google+). If I'm doing a Google search, it's because I'm asking a question my immediate friends can't help me with.
#DeleteChrome
Is anyone outside of the teenage girl crowd even paying attention to Facebook announcements anymore? I'm legitimately asking. I have a Facebook account that I log into maybe once or twice a year. And most of the circles I spend time in don't really use it much anymore either. Am I the only one that sees Facebook announcements and just shrugs with indifference?
Well, those of us who have successfully managed to stay off facebook can...
It's on America's tortured brow, That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
What Facebook doesn't seem to realize is that my Facebook "friends" aren't really my friends - they are a large group of family and acquaintances. I don't think my taste in food and/or movies matches maybe 10% of my FB contacts. So if I do search for movies or restaurants my "friends" like, I'm not likely to get any better results than if I search Google.
Plus everyone I know would have to share a lot more information to make this service useful.
I think so. Do you?
Zuck said that Facebook spends 3 percent of their CPU power on privacy. With such a low CPU budget dedicated to something as important as users' privacy, it's no wonder they do such a poor job of it.
I read 10%, not 3%:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/15/facebook-graph-search/
What would you consider to be a more reasonable amount of CPU budget to spend on excluding search results from some queries? I'm surprised it's as high as 10%, but I never really thought of CPU usage as a metric for privacy protection.
Rather than blowing it away outright (which some of the comments have done), let's think about it for a sec. There's some cool stuff going on here, and then a big question.
The cool stuff is the technology and innovation. Think about this for a sec - Facebook's engineers are essentially looking at a variety of signals to determine (a) intent and (b) likely outcome. The signals are getting increasingly complex - not simply keyword boolean queries any longer - and, to me, that's a fascinating growth and extension of technology. It's innovation.
The question, however, is whether there will be enough value, simplicity and meaning to change user behavior from defaulting to Google to defaulting to Facebook or Bing. In my observations of search, for instance, I've seen young people search for Bing on Google simply to access Bing to perform a search. Our default to Google to answer questions of all forms and types is deeply embedded in our action and thought. Furthermore, search will have to prove itself valuable to all the searches not relevant to social graph: typically research questions, like "Who was George Washington?".
So, I applaud the innovation, and will await time to view change, through the lens of history.
--Dave
"Addressing the obvious privacy concerns, the company said it wouldn't allow users to search content that wasn't already shared with them (or already public). "
Translation:
"This is totally worthless without shared, public data, so we plan to completely fuck with our privacy settings a whole bunch before this rolls out so that we can make sure your data is public and shared."
That would be what Google+ is for.
How can 10% of a server farm go to that? if(notallowed(X,Y)) { etc
How is that notallowed() function written?
boggles my mind. Maybe I am alone and the Ubercoders at FB really can spend 10% of quality CPU time satisfying that func().
H.
Facebook processes more than 500TB of data a day, and has over 100PB in its Hadoop cluster.
Maybe a simple notallowed() function doesn't scale linearly across many PB of data.