Facebook Graph Search

Facebook Graph Search was a semantic search engine that was introduced by Facebook in March 2013. It was designed to give answers to user natural language queries rather than a list of links. The Graph Search feature combined the big data acquired from its over one billion users and external data into a search engine providing user-specific search results. In a presentation headed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it was announced that the Graph Search algorithm finds information from within a user's network of friends. Additional results were provided by Microsoft's Bing search engine. In July it was made available to all users using the U.S. English version of Facebook. In December 2014, Facebook changed its search features, dropping partnership with Bing, and eliminating most of the search patterns.

The feature was developed under former Google employees Lars Rasmussen and .

The Graph Search Features was launched in Beta January 2013 as a limited preview for some English users in the United States. Company reports indicate that the service launched to between tens and hundreds of thousands of users.

The feature has been released only to limited users, with a slow expansion planned. Facebook announced plans for a future mobile interface and the inclusion of Instagram photos.

The name refers to the social graph nature of Facebook, which maps the relationships among users.

In late September 2013, Facebook announced that it would begin rolling out search for posts and comments as part of Graph Search. The rollout began in October 2013, but many people who had Graph Search were not given immediate access to this feature. A post on the Facebook Engineering blog explained that the huge amount of post and comment data, coming to a total of 700 TB, meant that developing Graph Search for posts was substantially more challenging than the original Graph Search.

Graph Search operated by use of a search algorithm similar to traditional search engines such as Google. However, the search feature is distinguished as a semantic search engine, searching based on intended meaning. Rather than returning results based on matching keywords, the search engine is designed to match phrases, as well as objects on the site.

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Wikipedia