I Might Be Too Old for Facebook Graph Search

Facebook Facebook's Graph Search.

On Sunday, I turned 30.

That’s not too old, I tell myself, yet the signs of aging are creeping in. Teenagers listen to music that I either haven’t heard of or believe to be mostly terrible. They use slang I don’t recognize, and I imagine my slang would sound to them like “groovy” or “far out” sound to me.

But for the purposes of our tech blog, the most notable sign is how much more active teens are on Facebook than I am. To hear it from my wife, who works with children and teens at her job, they’re constantly signed in and active, to the point that reaching them by voice call is unreliable. Send them a Facebook message, even during school hours, and they’ll respond right away. (The reality isn’t quite that extreme; according to a Pew survey, most teens communicate through text messages and phone calls more than Facebook, but e-mail is far behind.)

So when Facebook announces a new feature, like Graph Search, I imagine those teens getting the most use out of it. Graph Search lets you look up people, places, photos and other things using natural search queries. Think of it like Google for everything that your friends know; instead of searching the Web for somewhere to eat or something to do, you could just search through the collective wisdom of your network.

Here are some of the example searches on Facebook’s Graph Search home page:

Music my friends likeRestaurants in London my friends have been toPeople who like cycling and are from my hometownPhotos before 1990

Being able to find all that information–and provide your own information for friends–sounds great. But unless you and your pals are putting lots of data in, you’re probably not going to get a lot of data out. I know for sure that I haven’t put much effort into connecting my real life story to Facebook, and as I poke around my network, I see that many of my friends haven’t either. They don’t check in to places they visit. They don’t “Like” everything that they actually like. They haven’t uploaded photos from before 1990. Collectively, we haven’t invested in making Graph Search as useful as it could be.

It might be different if I was part of the generation that uses Facebook more often. Though it’s hard to find data on how Likes and check-ins vary by age, younger users tend to have more Facebook friends than older ones, according to Edison Research, so at least they have a bigger base of people to work with. And according to a 2011 study, teens spend more time on the network per day than older users. If posting on Facebook is part of your social circle’s daily life–that is, it’s not just a way to see what old high school buddies are up to–I imagine Graph Search will be a lot more useful.

That’s not to say Graph Search won’t be of any value to someone like me. It could come in handy as a way to sort through photos, for instance. There’s also a chance that Facebook will improve the ways that it picks up on our interests, and integrate frictionless sharing so there’s less work involved in becoming an information source.

But while I plan to keep up with technology for a long time, I realize it’s hard to keep using social networks like a teenager when your friends are getting older too. Facebook isn’t part of my daily life anymore, so I can’t imagine rewiring my habits and turning it into a primary information source, especially if my friends aren’t doing the same.  It’s much easier to rely on the tools I already have, such as traditional search engines and sites like Yelp–just like it’s easy to stop keeping track of popular music or to pick up on new slang.

Graph Search is in “very limited” beta now, and users who want to try it can join the waiting list. I look forward to seeing what I can do with it, even if it’s not really for me. In the meantime, here’s to growing older.

Top Five in Tech: Facebook’s Search Party

Facebook debuted a new search tool and Dell is in buyout talks. What else made the week’s tech headlines? Scott Austin joins Digits.

Facebook’s Graph Search Is the Future of Facebook

Facebook

Facebook held a big press event this morning. The company only sent out invitations last week, and when it did, it didn’t disclose the topic. But in a sense, everyone who pays close attention to Facebook has been waiting for this event for most of the site’s history — because the subject was Graph Search, the social network’s first truly serious search feature.

Like other great big Facebook-altering features like Timeline, Graph Search isn’t being unleashed in one fell swoop. It’s a beta for now, and only a minuscule percentage of users will get it immediately. (Everyone else can get on the waitlist at facebook.com/graphsearch.) Still, its arrival in even limited form is an important moment.

Graph Search lets you enter plain-English concepts that tie together multiple things the social network knows about the people who use it: where they live, where they work, where they’ve taken photos and what things they’ve liked. Among the searches Facebook provides as examples are “people who like tennis and live nearby,” “tourist attractions in Italy visited by my friends,” “movies liked by people who are film directors” and “friends of friends who have been to Yosemite National Park.”

The results aren’t Google-style links to external sites — they’re Facebook pages for the people, places and other things that match the query. In theory, at least, this new way to find information is both faster and far more personal than a conventional search engine. The notion that we might end up doing most of our interacting with Facebook by searching rather than browsing seems entirely plausible.

At the press event, Facebook did try to keep everyone’s expectations in check. CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent much of his presentation emphasizing what Graph Search isn’t. He kept saying that it’s not the same thing as “Web search” (or, as most of us tend to call it, Google).

More important, it isn’t a fully fleshed-out idea. This first version helps you find people, photos, interests and places, but there’s lots of stuff on Facebook it doesn’t know about yet. It doesn’t search status updates, for instance, and it’s not hooked into Facebook’s Open Graph, which ties the site together with third-party services like Spotify. It also doesn’t work on Facebook’s mobile apps yet. (Zuckerberg says Facebook’s to-do list for Graph Search should keep the company busy for the next several years.)

It’s not even clear yet just how useful Graph Search’s limited initial features will be. As I scanned the results for the example searches performed by Zuck and his co-presenters, Graph Search honchos Tom Stocky and Lars Rasmussen, many of them seemed painfully obvious, like a list of friends’ favorite TV shows that contained “well, duh” items such as The Office and Game of Thrones.

The most instantly appealing aspect of Graph Search may be photo search, which looks slick and fun. Without it, I have trouble finding my own snapshots I’ve uploaded, let alone ones from friends or public ones I might like.

If Graph Search fails to come up with any results at all — an outcome that sounds like it might be common — it’ll give you a standard page of Web search results. Those will be powered by Facebook partner and part owner Microsoft, and will be largely the same as the results you’d get if you just conducted the same search on Bing.

When Facebook launches something major, it’s easy to get irrationally exuberant about its potential: the e-mail-like messaging features it introduced in November 2010, which looked like they might be a landmark, didn’t usher in a new era for either Facebook or e-mail after all. But it’s been clear all along that a sophisticated search feature was the biggest missing piece of the Facebook puzzle — the one to let the site tap into everything it knows about a billion people in ways that might be both highly useful and enormously profitable. Now we know that Facebook is at work on that challenge.

Other than allowing for “Sponsored Search” promotional links, Facebook isn’t trying to make money off Graph Search yet. But if it takes off, and people start using Facebook to find restaurants, doctors, travel destinations and much more, it’s tough to imagine a scenario in which the site doesn’t make enormous amounts of money from precisely targeted advertising. It could rival Google as a money machine on a level it hasn’t done to date.

We’re talking Facebook here, so it’s a given that Graph Search is going to be controversial, at least at first. It doesn’t let you see anything you couldn’t have seen otherwise: all privacy settings are respected, and people won’t even show up in results if they haven’t given you access to the relevant facts that would otherwise put them there, such as their employer or location.

But Graph Search will make it a whole lot easier to find out stuff on Facebook. Facts that would otherwise have been buried in a profile or that might have scrolled off into the Timeline’s distant past will be only a search query away. It’ll be fascinating to see how that changes the way people use the service, and whether it rankles a meaningful number of users.

Facebook isn’t introducing any new privacy features related to Graph Search; at today’s event, Zuckerberg simply recapped recent privacy upgrades like the ability to review all your recent activity and adjust settings on the fly. He also said before Graph Search is made widely available, Facebook members will get a prominent message encouraging them to review their privacy choices. I expect that this won’t be enough to pacify privacy advocates and Facebook skeptics — though truth to tell, I think that much of the angst over Facebook privacy issues is overblown. (I’m never clear on why people who dislike Facebook use it at all.)

Me, I’m guardedly optimistic about Graph Search. I use Facebook for things I want to share, not for things I want to hide, so I’m not worried about the privacy implications. And my single biggest beef with the site is that it’s impenetrable: too much of the worthwhile stuff it contains is too hard to uncover. Graph Search could change that.

But it won’t change anything until millions of people get their hands on it. More thoughts to come once I do. For now, I’m reading what Wired’s Steven Levy and Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan have to say about all this.

The Challenge of Facebook’s Graph Search

dapd

Facebook is hoping that its new search engine will be the next big thing. But it will need a lot more cooperation from users.

On Tuesday, Facebook unveiled Graph Search, a tool that mines its vast trove of user data and surfaces results based on social signals, such as Facebook “likes.” CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the service as one of the social network’s three main pillars. One day, he mused, it could be a real business for Facebook. The hope is that people will use the tool not only to search for friends’ college photos when they’re bored, but also to discover local sushi restaurants, new music, singles in their neighborhood and employees for their businesses.

The problem: Facebook’s search engine is only meaningful if users are willing to give up more of their data, according to many analysts. That requires not only trust, already a prickly issue for Facebook, but also a major shift in how users spend their time on Facebook.

“We are at the very early stages of Graph Search, and look forward to seeing how people use the product and to learn from them,” a Facebook spokeswoman says.

Danny Sullivan, a founding editor of Search Engine Land, says it will be hard for Facebook to be a robust search engine because users don’t naturally share everything they do in the real world, such as visits to their children’s schools or doctors’ offices. He doesn’t believe Google provides a fulfilling experience for “friend-oriented recommendations” searches either, but says it’s hard to imagine a world where
Facebook friends have liked enough local businesses to make the tool comprehensive for local business searches.

“People may never want to check in with their children’s pediatrician,” he said. “And just because I don’t check in my children’s schools doesn’t mean I don’t like their schools.”

Mr. Sullivan says for most people, there’s a lot of stuff left off of Facebook. He reads a lot of books, for instance, but he rarely notes them on Facebook.

That incomplete nature of Facebook’s data can lead to some misleading results. A quick search, for example, of nearby people who are single yields a list of local friends and friends of friends who have listed themselves as “single.” However, this search, which potentially threatens to displace services like Match.com, included people in relationships because some unmarried young people don’t bother to change their relationship status to “in a relationship” because of the awkwardness of breaking up on Facebook if the relationship comes to an end.

Facebook’s Graph Search is also muddling through the challenge of how to best surface and rank results. A ranking algorithm, dependent on signals like “likes,” connections, comments and other interactions, helps dictate which items are pushed to the front of results. Mr. Zuckerberg said that when he searched for photos of himself and his wife, the photos with the most likes and comments were at the top. For searches of nearby restaurants, a lot of check-ins into that restaurant will help its placement in results. Mr. Zuckerberg on Tuesday said the company is working on encouraging reviews, such as star ratings of restaurants when people check in.

“People go to Facebook, to hang out, to express themselves, people don’t necessarily go there to find a restaurant,” says Apostolos Gerasoulis, a professor of computer science at Rutgers University. “It’s hard to push people to go to Facebook for something else, unless Facebook can give them significantly higher quality results.

He adds Facebook will need to find new ways to collect and parse data, well beyond “likes” or “check-ins,” to better anticipate what a user will like and what kind of music or local businesses, for example, would interest them.

“We will be looking at the feedback and data we get from the slow roll out to continually improve the order of search results so that the recommendations get better over time,” the Facebook spokeswoman says.

Then there’s the problem of trust. Over the past nine years, Facebook has had its share of privacy flaps. Last year, it finalized a settlement with regulators that will subject it to privacy audits for the next two decades. For its search tool, Facebook has tried to blunt privacy concerns early and announced plans to remind users to review what data they share. The company says users will only be able to search for data they already have access to.

Even so, Graph Search will make it incredibly easy for people to immediately retrieve information about their friends. Users may not feel comfortable that co-workers can find their college photos with one click, instead of four or five clicks. In practice, obfuscation can be a form of privacy.

“The issue is that privacy is not just what information could be found about you, but how that information can be discovered, how it could be aggregated and sliced and diced,” says Chris Conley, a Technology and Civil Liberties Fellow at the ACLU of Northern California. Mr. Conley also takes issue with how Facebook will make sure that companies aren’t taking advantage of search to target consumers. The company has said companies won’t be allowed to use Graph Search to target consumers, under its terms of service, though it’s unclear how that will be enforced or monitored.

“There’s a responsibility on Facebook to do more than tell businesses to act properly,” Mr. Conley says.

The Facebook spokeswoman says: “We understand that Graph Search provides another way for content you have shared on Facebook to be surfaced, and have taken steps to educate people on privacy settings and encourage them to review their content on Facebook and take action on anything that they don’t like.” said.

There are other signs that Facebook could be losing its users’ trust. Last month, the company was forced to backtrack on certain proposed changes to its terms of service for Instagram, its photo-sharing service, after users’ loudly said some of the new terms would allow advertisers to use their content and images for ads.

According to Patrick Salyer, CEO of Gigya, a service that helps sites integrate with social networks, Facebook users are beginning to pull back on using Facebook Connect, or using their Facebook log-ins to connect to third party sites and services. Gigya, which touches a billion users through its work, says Facebook Connect’s share of the social log-in market grew steadily until 2012, when it began to level off and now hangs at roughly 50%. Mr. Salyer says it’s a sign of wariness.

“Users don’t understand how their data is being used,” he says. “They’re looking for increased transparency, a better idea of what’s happening.”

Correction & Amplification: Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer’s name was incorrectly spelled in an earlier version of this post.

Facebook Graph Search Makes Privacy Seem Selfish

The subtle impact of Facebook Graph Search is that when you share openly, you share for the benefit of mankind. And when you don’t, or share to just a few people, you’re robbing the world of your knowledge, recommendations, and content. The question for each of us now is whether we prioritize our contribution or our privacy.

Facebook’s mission has long been “making the world more open and connected,” but until now, Facebook’s service has been better at connecting us to our friends.

The news feed and Timeline deliver what we post to people who already know us. Sharing was about self-expression — offering up a digital representation of who we are. What we shared could end up helping people, but we got a narcissistic boost from all those Likes and gained social capital in the process. Sharing wasn’t entirely altruistic.

Graph Search creates a potential audience for our content who we’ll never meet. Your Like of a gentle dentist or a tranquil park, your photo of a historic landmark or must-see event could influence decisions of people for the better. But you won’t know that. Your aid falls outside your network to those who stumbled across your donation via Graph Search.

This redefines our relationship with the Facebook share box. There’s suddenly a reason to share even if you can’t immediately foresee how or to who it will be valuable.

Those warm, fuzzy Likes and the chance to make people think you’re an expert might make you share things you thought your friends care about. However, the fear of getting zero Likes and annoying your friends may have discouraged you from sharing things that could assist someone eventually. A broadcast to the news feed was simply the wrong medium for your local dentist recommendation.

But if there were a way to take a quiet action that would be indexed by Graph Search, you might be much more willing to donate your advice and experience to Facebook. The problem is this doesn’t really exist. The closest approximation would be to publicly share something and then hide it from your Timeline. But that won’t actually hide Page Likes from the news feed, and people may not care if their addition to the graph can be pulled by friends who visit their Timeline. They just don’t want it pestering their friends from the homepage. Facebook needs to build this quiet contribution.

Why? Stow the cynicism for a moment and remember there are souls out there who really love to help others. While there are badges and elite status, altruism is the foundation of thriving communities like Yelp and Wikipedia. Not coincidentally, Facebook Graph Search challenges Yelp because it too can attract and offer up recommendations. If Facebook makes it easy to lend a hand, people will. Its graph could flourish, the world might find it truly valuable, and Facebook could turn it into a business that supports further innovation.

–

There is also a potential dark side to Graph Search — a chilling effect on sharing. When Facebook launched the news feed in late 2006, 750,000 of its 12 million users joined a group protesting the feature. They claimed that while all the stories in the news feed were only shown to people their authors allowed, it violated their “privacy through obscurity.” The effort that was required to find something on Facebook before news feed was protection enough. Despite concerns, people eventually grew to cherish the information stream.

Facebook went through another round of grumbling when it launched Timeline. Suddenly old posts could be dug up much more easily. But again, there was a degree of protection from employers, family, and romantic interests thanks to the friction of browsing through years of content in search of something offensive.

When Graph Search rolls out publicly, we may see the same sense of violation, but magnified by the ease of search. Before you might have shared something widely or publicly that might damage your reputation — a drunk photo, a controversial article, a joke in poor taste — but you’d assume its audience would typically be people who got your updates in the news feed.

Graph Search’s efficiency penetrates the armor of friction to discovery. A recruiter doesn’t have to comb years of Timeline. They can search for photos you’ve taken in Cancun. They can search for “people named Josh Constine interested in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.” And soon Facebook plans to index posts, meaning all your status updates and links can be dredged up.

Some people have nothing to hide. But for others whose identities aren’t necessarily aligned with their bosses or their parents, Graph Search could be a nightmare. Others still just don’t care about helping out. They’re not going to go to the trouble of Liking their favorite dentist in case it might assist a friend or a stranger. And finally there are people who just feel uncomfortable sharing so openly.

There’s nothing wrong with being any of these. If you don’t want to contribute, that’s fine, and it’s your choice. But now that Graph Search exists, it’s a choice you have to make.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

› Learn more jQuery(function() { jQuery("#tabs-crunchbase").tabs(); });