Facebook Graph Search

As Facebook’s new Graph Search continues to roll out, users will notice a slight change to their interface (mainly the top blue navigation bar, the search field and the location of their notifications and messages icons).

Facebook-Graph-Search-Bar

Facebook will offer you a tour of its new search function once it has been rolled out to you. The tour will demonstrate examples of searches you can now complete from within Facebook.

facebook-graph-search-sample-results

In your searching, you’ll notice that Facebook uses colors along with icon images to denote what type of result it is.

Facebook-Graph-Search-Icons

A goal of Graph Search is to be able to be very specific with your searches and uncover results that fit that exact set of criteria. For example, I may want to search for photos of my business partner.

Facebook-Graph-Search-Photo-Search

Currently, Facebook’s new search tool has been getting mixed results, at best. Particularly if you are looking for businesses or service providers. But like with anything online, tools improve with time (and some tweaking).

Graph Search is most helpful to search among your friends. Say you are planning a trip to Ireland and you want to find out who you know who has been there. Facebook’s Graph Search can help you identify those Friends (though you are limited to those Friends who have indicated they have traveled there, either by checking in or tagging a photo of a location in that country).

Facebook-Graph-Search-Friends-Search

To search for a business or service provider, you are still much better off using Google. For example, if I enter “pizza” into Facebook’s Graph Search, the suggested pages include 1 unclaimed Place page, 1 interest page, 2 national pizza chain pages, and 2 pages for national pizza chains in India and the Middle East (The same search on Google yields pizza places near my location).

Business-search-using-Graph-Search

If I add a location to my pizza search, I’m shown nothing but unclaimed Facebook Place listings.

Business-plus-location-search-using-Graph-Search

So while I would suggest sticking to using Graph Search for Friend-related searches only at this time, there is another take-away here: The more complete your profile and business page, the better likelihood another user will find you or your business the next time they use  Facebook’s new Graph Search.

Have you experimented with Facebook’s new Graph Search? What do you think of it?

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