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Facebook Is No Longer Flat: On Graph Search

The post Facebook Is No Longer Flat: On Graph Search appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.  —  A sample Graph Search result for the query “friends photos before 1999.”  —  By now the news is sweeping across the blogosophere …

John Battelle's Search Blog John Battelle

Context & Ripple Effects

A 2007 examination of what Facebook learned from search had already placed the company at the intersection of social data and discovery. Graph Search makes that connection a user-facing product, turning relationships and shared material into things people can query rather than merely browse.

Same-day coverage framed the launch against Bing, Google and Yelp, signaling that the significance lies beyond a new Facebook feature: social context is being positioned as an alternative way to find people, places and material.

First-order effects

  • Facebook users gain a search interface built around connections and shared activity, while Facebook gains a new way to organize discovery inside its service.
  • Facebook’s social graph becomes a more explicit product surface, rather than background information supporting profiles and feeds.

Second-order effects

  • Google, Bing and Yelp face pressure to distinguish general web, social and local discovery as Facebook presents relationship-based results as a separate search category.
  • Businesses and publishers with activity inside Facebook have greater incentive to cultivate visible social connections, because those connections can shape how users find them.

Third-order effects

  • If users adopt relationship-led queries, search competition shifts from indexing pages alone toward controlling the identity, connection and activity data that gives results context.
  • The launch points to a more fragmented search market, in which specialized data sets can challenge the one-box model of web search.

The trend: Search is moving toward context-rich discovery systems that compete on proprietary social and behavioral data, not only on web indexing.

Related: Facebook · Graph Search · With Graph Search, Facebook Bets on More Sharing

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