Introducing Graph Search • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#71

Post by baddox » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 7:30 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #46

baddox wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that Facebook doesn't calculate an affinity score between each pair of friends and use that to heavily weight search results? The affinity score definitely exists (EdgeRank), and it seems to be used all over Facebook currently, so I suspect it would be a big factor in search.

Usually talking about unpublished, constantly evolving algorithms in simplistic terms is a bad idea. The number of times people talk about Google PageRank in a discussion about "how Google works" is baffling because it's pretty obvious Google has a lot more going on behind the scenes than some simple algorithm in an academic paper.

I never implied that there's nothing else going on behind the scenes with Facebook's algorithms.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#72

Post by xk_id » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 7:30 PM UTC

Imo, facebook is really focusing on the wrong things here. I'd have been much more enthusiastic if they offered me tools for better control over my data, for example (incidentally, I had to spend 40 minutes just the other day using a Greasemonkey script to erase my entire Timeline). Or if the chat would be less clumsy. Or if they added cloud-based tools to groups, similar to Google Docs.

I can't really explain what's going on in their heads… Perhaps I'm just completely out of their target market, who knows.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#73

Post by jay_kyburz » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 7:30 PM UTC

guptaneil wrote: post #65

For a company that claims to understand the importance of mobile, why are the videos still in Flash? There is absolutely no reason they couldn't have used HTML5 with Flash fallback here.

I just watched them on an iPad. Perhaps it's The other way round?

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#74

Post by mtkd » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 7:31 PM UTC

A new API to see what people build before acquiring first couple of apps and throttling access?

Being able to weight my Google results with demographic or social graph attributes would be more useful for me - especially with purchases.

'restaurants in 10km range popular with 30-40 age professionals'

'most popular cookery books up to 3rd degree connections'

'top movies my close friends watched last week'

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#75

Post by alaskamiller » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 7:32 PM UTC

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…

First to replicate OKCupid's compatibility algorithm and automatically do it for Facebook profiles, throw it into a SoLoMo app, then charge $20 to hang out -- what the kids are calling it these days -- your top 5 compatible people and boom! You got a hit. Then watch it get copied.

But it's okay, you'll get the last laugh in another few decades when having a Facebook profile is more powerful than having government issued identification and we're in a topsy turvy world where if the Facebook personality emitting/detecting jewel you have to wear around your neck would light up if someone else compatible is close by for you to mate with.

At least you didn't contribute that to society.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#76

Post by ihsw » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 7:33 PM UTC

Interestingly Facebook's recent "Facebook Global University Hackathon" was won[1] by students who also utilized natural language processing.

Here is the previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4871854

[1] http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/news/facebook-hackathon

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#77

Post by NathanKP » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 7:33 PM UTC

jonmc12 wrote: post #61

Interesting to compare against Path (they announced search on 12/20 - http://www.wired.com/business/2012/12/path-social-archive/ ): Path: search personal events; discovery via proximity (nearby) Facebook: search graph events; discovery via common interest Seems like facebook trying to hone in on cases like dating (discovering people with common interests), and interest discovery (ie, restaurants that others like). Pa…

It seems like Facebook graph search has a lot more functionality, or maybe I just can't discover how to do everything that Path can do with search.

I did discover that it can do delightfully strange things like if you search for "snow" it finds all the moments that happened when it was snowing, even if the moment does not have the word "snow" in it. So it must link location and weather history with moments, which is pretty cool!

So Path has a lot of potential. I think the search interface just needs some work to expose more functionality like Facebook is.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#78

Post by sek » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 7:36 PM UTC

1. Weird marketing, the word "Graph" doesn't mean anything to average people. Just call it "Facebook Search". Also these cold hyper emotional sounds kinda turn me off, even Apple has more friendly ads. Did they steal the music from some apocalyptic space movie trailer?

2. Interesting problem, to make all that data available to natural search queries. Definitely an attack on Google who still can't really answer natural queries what Marissa Mayer was talking about ages ago.

3. There is just stuff from Facebook what I think is problematic because people don't share everything on Facebook. If they can expand it onto the whole web, it would be a game changer, but also way more difficult to solve.

4. I can't think of a query I would use this for other than testing it. If I search for Apple, I want to the Apple website. So I think this is more a solution on the search for a problem. Maybe they figure that out when it's out there.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#79

Post by state_machine » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 7:36 PM UTC

aganek wrote: post #60

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?

You're describing foursquare.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#80

Post by taliesinb » Tue, Jan 15, 2013, 7:36 PM UTC

jaydz wrote: post #50

taliesinb wrote: post #40

This bears much more resemblance to Wolfram|Alpha than it does to Google Search. Glad to see natural language interfaces are finally going mainstream.

The example queries remind me of Prolog.

Well, not in terms of syntax :).

No, I think they're probably doing proper natural language parsing, and from there hand-coded translation to (their internal version of) FQL.

I wonder how flexible their grammar is. It'll be pretty easy to reverse engineer the techniques they are using by looking at failure modes of parses and how intelligently they correct fall-throughs.