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March 25, 2013

Facebook Graph Search Rolling Out Slowly

By Oliver VanDervoort, Contributing Writer

Facebook’s (News - Alert) graph search hasn’t been around that long, but already there are some pretty obvious trends surfacing with respect to those already are using the service.



The system officially launched in January, but like other services for the social networking site, it hasn’t been rolled out to everyone at the same time. Facebook tends to provide just a portion of its members an update or new program before rolling it out to everyone, in the interest of making sure it works correctly.

For those who are able to access and use it, the service can be quite useful. The Graph Search works by diving deep into the mountains of user data that Facebook fosters for when when they update their Timelines. If you want to be able to figure out which of your childhood friends live in Europe, you’ll be able to access that kind of a search now.

If you want to be able to find out how many pictures there are of a certain kind of monument, park or just famous place on Facebook, you’ll be able to do that as well. Facebook is using the version it has released to a comparatively handful of people as a sort of beta launch, and the full version still could be several months away from the Facebook community at large.

Among those who have been able to use the search function, Tom Stocky, product search manager for Facebook, said the service is being greeted with pretty positive reviews.

“People seem to find it most useful around people and photos queries. Places are the thing they are starting to like as well. And the things we continue hearing in terms of where we need to improve is, we have to do a much better job understanding everything that people type into the search box,” Stocky said recently.

Stocky added that one of the biggest challenges to getting this software to work is building an algorithm that will recognize the different ways people phrase questions. We had to build the product to recognize "buddies," "pals," "besties" and all of the other variations of the word, "friend," Stocky added.




Edited by Braden Becker
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