Facebook Inc took the wraps off a new search tool yesterday that lets people trawl their network of friends to find everything from restaurants to movie recommendations, an improvement that’s likely to increase competition with review websites like Yelp and potentially even Google Inc.
The so-called graph search marks the company’s biggest foray into online search to date, though it displays only information within the walls of the social network rather than links to sites available across the internet.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 28-year-old founder and chief executive, introduced the new product at the company’s first major product launch since a rocky initial public offering in May.
“Graph search is designed to take a precise query and return to you the answer, not links to other places where you might get the answer,” Zuckerberg told reporters at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters. “What you’ve seen today is a really different product from anything else that’s out there.”
Facebook shares, which have climbed 15 per cent since the start of the year, slid three per cent yesterday to just above $30 (€23). The product news fell short of some of the most optimistic predictions, which included speculation that the social network would introduce its own smartphone or an internet search engine.
Dubbed ‘graph search’ because Facebook refers to its growing content, data and membership as the ‘social graph’, the function will be available at first only as a ‘beta’, or trial, for just hundreds of thousands of its billion-plus users.
It will let users browse mainly photographs, people, places and members’ interests. Zuckerberg stressed that people can sort through only content that has been shared with them, addressing potential privacy concerns.
Shares in Yelp dived more than six per cent on fears that Facebook’s new friends-based search concept will begin to draw users away from the popular reviews site, which also lets people maintain a circle of trusted friends. Google stock held steady.
Some analysts said Facebook may be taking a tiny step towards eventually challenging Google on its home turf, but said that was a much more challenging undertaking and a long-term possibility at best.
Zuckerberg stressed that the new graph search did not encompass internet searches, Google’s specialty.
The world’s largest online social network, Facebook is moving to regain Wall Street’s confidence after the IPO and concerns about its long-term financial prospects.
Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter argued that recommendations from trusted friends were more valuable than from strangers on the web.
Facebook has a vast amount of information in its social network, including roughly 200 billion photos. But some analysts noted that the information each user has access to through a network of friends is not always that extensive and could limit the usefulness of Facebook’s search offering.
The search technology will use the ‘likes’, ‘check-ins’ and star ratings that Facebook users have posted about restaurants to determine the order of the recommendations displayed, though Facebook search engineering head Lars Rasmussen noted that users’ comments about restaurants don’t currently affect search result rankings.
Zuckerberg said the search tool was a work in progress that would take the company years to fully build out. He pointed to a variety of additional features on the horizon, such as support for additional languages and the ability to incorporate data from third-party services, like online music services, which connect to Facebook.