Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Facebook's Graph Search: It's a small search world



As if Google isn’t beleaguered enough with the European challenge to its dominance, equally stock-busting Internet heavyweight Facebook is expanding its empire into search functions through its Graph Search feature. Not that it’s going to see the competitive search engine queries from now on, as Google remains the untrammeled champion of search result sieving. Facebook, however, has something that Google doesn’t: friends.

Image source: searchengineland.com


There’s nothing like peer pressure or word of mouth to influence search queries. Google could shrug this off by claiming that the world’s news and most relevant information archives are at its disposal, especially as it has been aggregating like a demon. But even news sites are creating their own circles of friends over Facebook. In time, Google’s reaction to this tighter, more focused ecosystem of research could be tested.

Already, Google is exhibiting its sang froid. Web and business analysts are also around to allay its insecurities of being overtaken as a premier search engine. For one, Facebook is yet to have a platform that will localize searches the way Google maps does. The queries conducted over Graph Search will play into the hands of very specific interests, such as local restaurants and movie schedules.

Image source: foxnews.com

Graph Search is predicted to generate revenue for Facebook, since it directly displays what consumers of different tastes want in any given circle of people. Products and services come up as search results based on popularity, or the number of Facebook “likes” they generate.

Image source: gadgets.ndtv.com

It also boosts its partnership with Microsoft, whose own search platform, Bing!, will be used in the two-column interface of Graph Search results as the aggregator of recommendations. In all likelihood, Facebook will evolve into at least a special kind of a metasearch engine, much like MetaCrawler or MySearchResults.

MySearchResults was developed as a refinement for search results on the usual platforms, like Google and Yahoo!. As a metasearch engine, it scrounges for the top results across different search engines, allowing the user to prioritize certain results. Try it out here.

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