Live data from Hacker News

Introducing Graph Search

facebook.com

31–40 of 266 posts

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#31
I don't quite see how this is big competition for Google (yet). Facebook GS can return me more data about my friends than Google can, but Google can return more results for general information. These seem very different from one another.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#32
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't appear to be live yet. How are you trying out these searches?

I'm watching the demo.

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.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#34
post #28

Not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet, but if you watch the video on the bottom part of the page with Zuck, one of them explicitly says how this product competes with Google. Something about how if two people search for Apple on Google, they'll get the same results, but if they search Apple on FB Graph Search, they'll get personalized results. It's really interesting from a technology perspective the way that sea…

> one of them explicitly says how this product competes with Google. Something about how if two people search for Apple on Google, they'll get the same results, but if they search Apple on FB Graph Search, they'll get personalized results. Except that's not true. Google personalizes results for users and also sometime integrates social aspects (through Google+). If I search for pizza I see a map of pizza places close…

>Google personalizes results for users and also sometime >integrates social aspects

Right, except this doesn't actually work unless all of your friends work at Google.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#35
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ITYM "People who live in Palo Alto who like Sushi who aren't my Grandma or my one friend bob who has horrible taste or oh crap that one guy fred who i accidentally friended or ..." I don't know anyone who has a very clean social graph that they can formulate sane preference queries about.

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.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#37
post #34
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one of them explicitly says how this product competes with Google. Something about how if two people search for Apple on Google, they'll get the same results, but if they search Apple on FB Graph Search, they'll get personalized results. Except that's not true. Google personalizes results for users and also sometime integrates social aspects (through Google+). If I search for pizza I see a map of pizza places close…

>Google personalizes results for users and also sometime >integrates social aspects Right, except this doesn't actually work unless all of your friends work at Google.

The social aspects I assume? Personalization absolutely works as it brings up a map of all the pizza places closest to me. Your search shows all the places closest to you.

Re: Introducing Graph Search

#39
post #27
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ITYM "People who live in Palo Alto who like Sushi who aren't my Grandma or my one friend bob who has horrible taste or oh crap that one guy fred who i accidentally friended or ..." I don't know anyone who has a very clean social graph that they can formulate sane preference queries about.

Facebook can solve this algorithmically without you needing to have a "clean social graph" or write complex queries to exclude your grandmother.

Proof? Most of these algorithms build models that do affinity weighting, and then try to guess at how the same some other person is as me (which is hard across such a variety of attributes).

There is no magic, so please explain the math/algorithms you think would work here.

(Sorry, it's just a lot of people wave the magic "algorithm" flag when faced with hard problems)

Post reply on HN