We just had a quick hands-on of Facebook's new "Graph Search" with one of the demo stations here at the Facebook event. Unfortunately we weren't whitelisted at the time so we couldn't use any of our own data, but we still got a decent idea of how it worked. 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.
In addition to playing with the Facebook's newest function, we briefly spoke with Tom Stocky about the challenges of creating Graph Search. He told us that two biggest challenges faced by his team was 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 they wanted the visual language of the search to look like Facebook and not Bing, and they certainly succeeded on that front. Check our video after the break.
Continue reading Facebook Graph Search hands-on (video)
Filed under: Internet, Facebook
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/6udd0cYJiYM/
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