Facebook Graph Search: A powerful tool for discovery

Facebook has evolved into dual platform giant, dominating the mobile and desktop world. Now hosting 1.1 billion users, Facebook has undergone major changes in the way users interact, share and message stories with others. Among these changes, is the Facebook graph feature: a search engine that can pull massive amounts of data sentence search.  

The new facebook feature is accessible to a certain percentage of users, and it allows them to extrapolate information about friends and even friends of friends. For example, you can search for “Photos of my friends with cousins who enjoy playing soccer and live in Chicago.”

Facebook will dig through its immersive database of pull out specific cases you search for and present you photos of users you may not even be friends with.

Although I agree that there are privacy issues with Graph Search, it is still an incredibly powerful tool to use when wanting to learn more about friends. Its an intuitive way to understand your friends’ timelines and recent history.  

Facebook users have already given up many of their privacy rights by signing up for the social service. The long and dreadful “I agree to terms” contract has many subtle tenets that repeal privacies that users are accustomed to in the physical world. 

The whole premise of Facebook is to discover and learn more about your friends. It’s about the social experience and Graph search compliments that functionality. In addition to learning more about friends, users can also learn more about places, restaurants, shops ext. The search engine is the second most effective search, following Google’s famous homepage search. 

Graph search’s ability to extend to not just a user’s social circle but to also locations and events makes it the ultimate tool for discovery. 

People may feel that Graph search is intrusive or an effective stalker-tool, but a user’s profile is already vulnerable to malicious actions. Facebook users have already put themselves in the limelight and can already be subject to the privacy dangers that are ubiquitous in Facebook’s timeline and group features. 

So why single out Graph search as the feature that exposes privacy issues while the Facebook framework lies upon discovery of individuals? Facebook has grown its network due to its ability for easy access of information and Graph search only provides another way for retrieving data. 

Graph search is the missing puzzle piece to Facebook’s grand expansion in the social network space and gives users the way to access their connections in a whole new way.