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Introducing Graph Search

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Re: Introducing Graph Search

#51

Post by prostoalex »

DannyBee wrote: post #35
prostoalex wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much information on sushi places in Palo Alto is your grandma pumping into the system to dominate that sector? Is she checking into multiple sushi places dozens of times a day? It's like supplementing every google query with -site:4chan.org on the off-chance a search for a camera lens spec or node.js tutorial would lead to 4chan.

Replace "grandma" with "person whose taste in sushi is very different" if it makes you feel better.

Mmmkay, so out of 3 ways to implement ranking:

1) Rank by popularity among all friends.

2) Rank by global number of check-ins.

3) Rank by a one-off friend's preferences.

You think (3) is the way something called GraphSearch works?

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#52

Post by mutual_likes »

phwd wrote: post #15

I'm torn. On one side I really like it, it reminds me of the old People Search feature Facebook used to have. On the other side for third party developers especially those who try to make the Facebook experience better, I'm afraid this is reinforcing the point you should not build 100% on platforms. I'm sure there are many who have had this idea or are building this currently. Facebook Heroku templates given for new…

I would be torn too if people used my app, but I like this. Building your own app has it's limits. I built a facebook app to show mutual likes sorted by likes because facebook's pages browser only showed mutual likes sorted by friends. The FQL to do this is slow and unusable if someone has many hundreds of friends and likes. Plus, some friends don't allow apps to query their data, so the result is incomplete.

My feature request would be to allow us to create and share custom FQL and views computed and rendered by facebook. Then, friends don't have to give permission to apps to access their data and facebook runs the query faster.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#53

Post by simonsarris »

This is an important step for Facebook and I'm surprised no one has really mentioned it (all ~50 comments so far are about the graph search).

The big thing here isn't graph search, or the fancy searching per se. The big thing here is this:

> "and meet new people, too."

This is huge. Huge!

Facebook from the start was envisioned as a sort-of dating platform but that part of it got swept under the rug real quick. Throughout Facebook's history meeting people with Facebook has been a slim thing. Typically it was always one way:

Meet in real life -> Add on facebook.

It's only a matter of time until Facebook tries to make it the other way around. It seems they're explicitly avoiding the "dating" route, which may or may not be wise (dating sides have some weird connotations among some groups of people). It looks like they've finally found their solution.

The amazing thing here isn't Graph. It's that Facebook is going to change its paradigm so that meeting new people is a viable goal of going on Facebook.

So eventually we'll be meeting people through Facebook, starting with meetup.com style interests. That's big.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#54

Post by priley »

Pretty awesome that Facebook could pull this off so quickly. I literally said that exact line to Lars (who lead the search team) during our meetings last year... I can't believe he reused verbatim in the video:

"Facebook is for the all the people you know... Ark is for all the people you should know".

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#55

Post by shock-value »

Some of the examples in the promo videos are pretty far-fetched. I mean, does anyone really give Facebook any information about which dentist he or she goes to? I've never even seen a post from someone talking about going to the dentist, let alone including the dentist's actual name!

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#56

Post by taliesinb »

monkeyfacebag wrote: post #23

Graph Search seems like strange branding to me. I almost didn't click the link because I thought "Graph Search" was a new API and not a user-facing product (to be fair, the context was a posting on HN so I was predisposed to think API). Graph Search's real focus appears to be on the use of natural language and the presentation of/interaction with data. The "Graph" is almost the least interesting about it.

Yeah, I agree the branding is odd. To most people, graph still means a dimly remembered plot of sin(x) rather than, you know, a network.

Of course OpenGraph wasn't either open or a graph, but then that was a developer product.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#57

Post by faramarz »

Very cool! Can't say much else until I try it. I have a large number of conservative friends who have enabled every privacy setting and provide minimal meta-data, so I already know it won't be as the PR video depicts.

Anyway, This reminds me of of the Google+ search by www.findpeopleonplus.com

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#59

Post by shmerl »

simonsarris wrote: post #53

This is an important step for Facebook and I'm surprised no one has really mentioned it (all ~50 comments so far are about the graph search). The big thing here isn't graph search, or the fancy searching per se. The big thing here is this: > "and meet new people, too." This is huge. Huge! Facebook from the start was envisioned as a sort-of dating platform but that part of it got swept under the rug real quick. Throug…

That's where other social networks differ. On Diaspora for example one probably doesn't know anyone after joining, and you always meet new people. You follow interests, subjects and conversations, not your acquaintances from real life. So it may be "big" for Facebook, but it's routine for other networks.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#60

Post by aganek »

I think this a big deal.

The first step to a Yelp killer? Type in "Italian Restaurant" and get back list of all the restaurants your friends have checked into. A recommendation engine.

For now, its mostly to filter your facebook data. But do you think it can expand and become the goto search engine, ala google?

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