Facebook is launching a search engine for content within its social network, and the new service will be called “Graph Search”, announced the Chairman of the Board of the company, Mark Zuckerberg. This is “a new way for people to navigate their connections to people and content on Facebook,” Zuckerberg said, according to BBC News Online. Zuckerberg explained that the service will take into account the right to privacy, displaying only Facebook content results that are distributed and are accessible to the user performing the search.
The first search factor of the “Graph search” service will be the informative value, the second is temporal proximity, and the third the interest of the “friends” on the user’s searching page, interest determined by the number of “likes”.
Facebook founder and president insisted that the new service is not a broad search on the Internet, but only on Facebook, so it is not a direct competitor to Google. “We’re not searching the web,” said Zuckerberg.” He added: “We’re indexing our map of the graph – the graph is really big and its constantly changing.”
According to CNBC, Facebook’s new search system undoubtedly compete with Google. Why bother looking for a restaurant or a hotel on Google when you can see where they go from your list of friends on Facebook? “You can only search content that has been shared with you,” Zuckerberg said.
In this context, if Facebook manages to keep people using this new service, this means more opportunities to sell advertising and therefore making money and challenging Google’s search service.
According to Bloomberg, following the announcement, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) shares fell less than 1% to $30.75. The stock was down 2.74% for the day, closing at $30.10. Google Inc. shares. (NASDAQ:GOOG) went up, but not significantly, closing at $724.93 (+0.23%) after Facebook assured that the graph search will not be a general search engine service.
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