Finally, the much rumored and much awaited answer from Mark Zuckerberg to Google’s search is here. Facebook is calling it the graph search, and if you’re still confused about what the big deal is, read on to know more about how the graph search will affect your life. But the real question that’s on everybody’s mind is if it will change the way we look up stuff on the internet? Will it cause us to reduce our dependence on Google, the search engine giant?
One of the key differences between the good old Google search and this new Facebook graph search is the concept of looking for links versus looking for information that is liked by people in our networks. Yes, it does mean that search is going social, but in a bigger way than Bing and even Google has managed to take it. Google did try this with the +1’s from its own social network, Google+, but Facebook depends solely on the Likes while rating its results.
Another aspect that is unique to the Facebook graph search is the idea of multidimensional search. While looking up information on restaurants in a particular area through Google will give you just the specific answer, trying out this query on Facebook’s graph search could give you information about restaurants in that particular area that are recommended by your friends based on their experiences. See what we mean when we say search has gone social in a big way?
Now whether Facebook’s graph search will succeed over Google solely depends on what we search over the internet for on a regular basis. How important is your friends’ opinion on, say, hard facts and history? But when it comes to finding a good doctor or a good restaurant, we don’t mind the social aspect that Facebook’s graph search brings in.
We don’t know just yet how effective Facebook’s search would be as a replacement to Google search, but if you want to look up your activity on Facebook, we’d say it would work just fine. But for anything bigger, we doubt if it’s time to bid farewell to Google just yet.