Facebook Graph Search Beta
When you’ll get it, you’ll get a notification at the top of your Facebook page and you’ll be able to turn it on and see a quick tour.
After the tour, the first thing you’ll notice is that the top bar of Facebook pages is larger, looking something like this.
Once you click that area (a highlighted search bar wouldn’t have hurt), a list will appear under it. It allows you to search for a bunch of categories, like your friends, friends’ photos, Restaurants nearby, Games your friends play, and music or photos that they’ve liked.
Here’s where the fun begins. If you decide to just go with the flow, you can scroll through these categories and hit the Tab key when you find something interesting. Depending on your list of friends, you’ll get various suggestions to go forward. I tried “Music my friends like” and got another list of possible connections, like Music my friends who like Bandsintown listen to.
I’ve also learned never to see what music my friends like, or I’ll end up not being friends with some of them anymore. But I digress…
Once you get the results page, you’ll notice it provides the ability to refine the search results. They’re on the right. An interesting thing is that if you press Tab too much, you could end up with some really strange results like: “Music my friends friends of mine work with who listen to…”
You can also search for connections, like friends who went to your school, or friends who like certain sports, movies, etc. You can also use it to search for whatever you want on the web, as it works for that, too. Those results are powered by Bing.
Microsoft’s Bing search is already integrated in Facebook’s web search, and has been for quite some time already. In fact, Bing uses Facebook data for its own social search. But the partnership should produce a better unified experience.
Remember this is the beta of the new Graph Search feature, and as time goes by, the service should become more useful. As well as provide cool power searching tricks. Comment
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