Initial thoughts on Facebook Graph search

I’ve been playing around with the new Graph search which i just got this afternoon.

First impressions – BEST “tour” I’ve ever seen in a product – instead of canned searches & results the TOUR uses logical elements from your Facebook profile and actual live results (in my case “University of Chicago” then “my friends who attended the University of Chicago”)

Second impressions – very cool but the auto completion vs actual search is frustrating – and will be MUCH more so when (if) they allow searching in blobs of texts (i.e. updates, shares, posts etc) – much that I would want to actually search for won’t be possible.

For example something like “friends who are hiring” which would be awesome to get reasonable results for isn’t currently feasible.

And more playing with the searches also shows a lot about who is/isn’t keeping their profiles active and up-to-date. Definitely increases the value/importance of keeping elements of your FB profile accurate (companies you work/worked at for example). They also don’t quite get that distinction – i.e. Dave McClure showed up in a simple search I did for “friends who work at Paypal” (note that my search was in the present tense – of course I know Dave used to work there… )

This will also be useful but will suffer from the “when/how” do I use this? Will Graph search be available to me via the FB apps? Or just the website? Will it be a standalone mobile app (ala Messenger) What more complex use cases will this have beyond the obvious friend stalking/local restaurant suggestions types of things.

Seth Blank’s YourTrove.com is still FAR more useful for me – that lets me search stuff that has been shared with me (full text search of posts) – i.e. insanely useful in tracking down stuff I know someone shared with me at some point in the past but which I can’t recall the precise details (for example the private, friend’s only post where a friend shared the names of his newborn children)

Overall definitely going to be an interesting shift in how Facebook is used.