Facebook Updated
By Katherine Chow
Web site makes announcement on search feature
Katherine Chow
The Santa Clara
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new search feature that's designed to entice people to spend more time on its web site and will put the social networking company more squarely in competition with Google, Inc. and other rivals, such as Yelp and LinkedIn.
Called "Graph Search," the new service unveiled Tuesday lets users quickly sift through their social connections for information about people, interests, photos and places.
Until now, Facebook users were unable to search for friends who live in a certain town or like a particular movie.
Facebook users will also be able to enter search terms the same way that they talk, relying on natural language instead of a few stilted keywords to telegraph their meaning.
Facebook is a driving force on college campuses, but students at Santa Clara are wary about the new addition to the social media powerhouse. Freshman Josh Taylor is somewhat undecided on the new addition.
"I think it can end up being an invasive tool because it can bring up parts of people's profile from years ago and can end up resurfacing (them)," said Taylor.
Only a fraction of Facebook's more than 1 billion users will have access to the new search tool beginning Tuesday because the company plans to gradually roll it out during the next year.
Not all the interests that people share on Facebook will be immediately indexed in the search engine either, although the plan is to eventually unlock all the information in the network while honoring each user's privacy settings.
This means users can only search for content that have been granted permission to see by their online connections.
Though the company has focused on refining its mobile product for much of last year, the search feature will only be available on Facebook's website for now, and only in English.
Although Facebook isn't trying to fetch information across the web like Google does, it's clearly trying to divert traffic and ad spending from its rival.
It's the kind of personal data that has been difficult for Google to collect, partly because Facebook has walled off its social network from its rival's search engine.
Instead, Facebook has partnered with Microsoft Corporation to use its Bing search engine to power traditional web searches done through its site.
Facebook's decision to start its foray into search slowly reflects the formidable challenge that it's trying to tackle. The "social graph," as Facebook calls it, is its trove of connections between people and things.
Contact Katherine Chow at klchow@scu.edu or call (408) 554-4852. AP contributed to this report.