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Facebook's updated search tool leaves out Bing results
Facebook recently updated its Graph Search tool to make it easier to find friends' old posts. According to Reuters, though, the company failed to announced another change: it has apparently stopped showing Bing results, as well. The social network launched Graph Search in 2013, giving people a quick way to scour the website for posts, pages and users. It could also be used like a typical search engine (thanks to Bing), so you could, theoretically, research for a school paper without leaving the website. Both companies have confirmed the change to VentureBeat, even saying that it was implemented a while ago.
Facebook makes it easier to find your friends' old posts
Facebook has taken quite a few steps to help you find people and certain posts, but actually sifting through your friends' post history has been tricky. How are you supposed to find the photos from that epic party last summer? It may not be as much of a challenge now that Facebook has updated its Graph Search beta to help you track down your friends' shared posts. If you search for "Anna summer party," for example, you'll see everything Anna wrote about that memorable get-together. The smarter search is available this week for iPhone and web users in English. Unfortunately, there's no mention of other platforms and languages so far.
Facebook expands Graph Search to include status updates and posts
Today, Facebook is giving Graph Search something of a power-up by adding status updates and posts to the list of content it can access. Previously, the revamped search engine could only scan four types of information -- people, photos, places and interests -- when presented with queries like "who are my friends in New York City?" Now, if someone types in "posts about bacon from the last month," your recent public complaint about the wilted lettuce in your B.L.T. will pop up. Also included in the expansion are check-ins, comments and photo captions. As it has at every step of the Graph Search rollout, Facebook is quick to assure its users that the feature respects your privacy settings, so only content that's been shared with you or is otherwise publicly accessible will show up in search results. For more information, head on over to the source link below.
Facebook unveils Trending Topics, makes Graph Search available everywhere in US English
Facebook must be a little envious of Twitter's ability to seize on trends -- it just started experimenting with Trending Topics, a Timeline card that shows the hottest subjects on the social network. Users can tap a trend to see both public comments and posts, whether or not the contributors are friends. The service is only being tested with a small number of those using Facebook's mobile website right now. If you're too impatient for that, the company has a consolation prize: Graph Search is now available to everyone visiting the site in US English, regardless of where they live. The expansion comes with the end to a handy privacy tool that lets members see who can search their Timeline, but Facebook claims that few have been using this feature -- we shouldn't miss it too much.
This is Your Life: Facebook and the business of identity
"The story of your life." With that phrase, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the company's new Timeline profile in the fall of 2011. The social network's original profile page, he explained, was the first place where most people "felt safe expressing their real self" on the internet, but it was only the "first five minutes of your conversation." A major redesign in 2008 extended that to "the next 15 minutes." Timeline, though, was the "next few hours." Your true self, in full. To illustrate the point, Zuckerberg went on to show a promotional video that put This Is Your Life to shame by recapping one man's life from his own birth to the birth of his child (and then some) in just over a minute. Facebook has always wanted to be your online identity -- your internet, in many ways -- but it was now also bringing something else to the fore that once had a tendency to fade into the background; your memories.
Facebook rolling out Graph Search to US users this week
Remember that profile-specific social network search tool Mark Zuckerberg announced back in January? It's finally ready for the general public. According to the New York Times and ABC News, Facebook Graph Search will start rolling out to US users this Monday. The update is more than a simple search bar revamp, however -- it allows users to mine their social circle for very specific information, asking questions like "Who are my friends in San Francisco," or searching for "people who went to Stanford who like the 49ers." The tool is designed to harken back to the company's original goal of connecting people, and aims to help users draw lines between their friends and interests. Graph Search will also pull select data from Bing, allowing users to peek at the weather from the comfort of their timeline. Despite launching on a wider scale, the service isn't perfect -- the New York Times reports that it still has trouble juggling synonymous phrases (something we experienced in our own hands-on), returning discrepant results for searches like "people who like to surf" and "people who like surfing." The tool also works within the confines of a user's privacy settings and public activity, meaning that you won't accidentally uncover your cousin's secret My Little Pony fan-group if its privacy settings are locked down. The feature is set to debut for a few hundred million users this week, and will continue to become available to the all US users in the coming weeks.
The Weekly Roundup for 01.14.2013
You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 7 days -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Facebook Graph Search hands-on (video)
We just had a quick hands-on of Facebook's new "Graph Search" at one of the demo stations here at Facebook's press event. Unfortunately we weren't whitelisted at the time so we couldn't use any of our own data (update: we did a bit later -- see below) but we now have a decent idea of how it all works. Using the four "pillars" of Graph Search -- people, photos, places and interests -- we looked up terms like "My friends who like Star Wars and Star Trek," "Restaurants in San Francisco that my friends like," "Photos of hiking in national parks" and managed to get results every time. There's a side bar of drop-downs to refine the search further -- you can narrow the results by gender, categories, interests, etc. Overall the UI is clean and intuitive; those who are already familiar with Facebook should find no problem navigating the interface. The results are listed vertically in a pretty straightforward manner, as seen in the photo above. In addition to playing with the Facebook's newest function, we briefly spoke with Tom Stocky, former Googler and director of product, about the challenges of creating Graph Search. He told us that two of the biggest hurdles faced by his team were dealing with the massive amount of data and incorporating natural language search. To solve the second problem, the company brought in computational linguists to work with Facebooks's engineers, and for the most part, it seems Facebook succeeded in its natural language efforts. However, we did encounter a snag: when we searched for "My friends who like the San Francisco 49ers who also went to Stanford," we encountered no results. When we switched the terms around to "My friends who went to Stanford who like the 49ers," the results finally kicked in. Of course, Graph Search is still clearly a beta product, so it's likely to eliminate such snafus as development continues. As for Graph Search's integration with Bing, that worked fairly smoothly as well. Stocky said to us that the product team wanted the visual language of the search to look like Facebook and not Bing, and they certainly succeeded on that front. Check our quick hands-on video and more impressions after the break.
Facebook partners with Bing to deliver web results in Graph Search
Social media giant Facebook just announced that its new Graph Search tool will also incorporate results from the wider web thanks to a partnership with Microsoft and Bing. Obviously, people won't flock to Graph Search if it's capabilities are limited to where your friends live and the restaurants they like. Zuckerberg and crew will have to provide some way to find information that Facebook simply can't provide (for now...). That's where Bing comes in, with its ability to pull data like current weather conditions -- something your old frat buddies are probably useless to provide. This is hardly the first time Redmond has gotten cozy with Facebook. The social network is integrated rather closely with the search engine and Bing has been providing web search results on Facebook for sometime. Now there's just less of a wall between the two when looking at results. With Graph Search, Bing results are put front and center, with some social context. For a bit more information from Microsoft's perspective hit up the more coverage link.
Facebook launching 'Graph Search' personalized social search engine, beta starts today (video)
Facebook this morning announced "Graph Search," a way to search all of Facebook's content for queries tailored to your profile. CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the search by saying, "Graph Search is meant to answer very specific questions like 'Who are my friends in San Francisco?" In a video released by Facebook just after the announcement, project lead Lars Rasmussen (formerly of Google Maps / Waves fame) related a story about needing a dentist in a town he'd just moved to, and being able to search through which dentists his friends used for a tailored result. Worry not, privacy protectors: we're told Graph Search is "privacy aware;" Facebook's even dedicated 10 percent of its computing power just to the goal of ensuring privacy. And no, none of your privacy settings will automatically change as a result of signing up or using Graph Search. It's being touted as a return to Facebook's roots, when the company's main goal was forging connections between people (rather than, say, a gaming portal, or a means for companies to advertise). Graph Search is essentially a relaunch of Facebook's internal search engine, allowing its already existing users to forge new relationships with folks they may not otherwise meet, and to find content that's hyper-specific. The beta -- albeit in a limited, English-only capacity -- kicks off today. During that period only a "subset of content" is available through search, with four primary areas of focus: people, photos, places, and interests. Facebooks says Graph Search will expand, "over the coming months," with additions like searchable wall posts and song listens (only if your privacy settings allow those things to be searchable, that is). You can head right here to get whitelisted for the beta, which is apparently rolling out "very slowly." Or you could head past the break right now for the full PR from Facebook and a walkthrough video, as well as a slew of updates from our liveblog.
