Earlier today, Facebook announced a new advanced search engine for users called Graph Search. The engine allows users to search content friends and others have shared in rather interesting ways.
For example, a phrase like “Friends who live in Los Angeles under 30” would produce a list of all your friends who currently live in Los Angeles and are under 30 years old. While Graph Search was built by Facebook, sometimes results from the web need to be pulled in to help add context to results. Facebook was planning on working with Google, but that plan fell apart over privacy concerns.
When using Graph Search, you might want external data (like weather, ticket prices, etc) pulled into the results. That data will be supplied from Bing because Google wasn’t willing to work with Facebook on their privacy needs. When a Facebook user changes their privacy setting on something like a photo, Google was unwilling to remove it from their search index. Facebook hasn’t always had the best stance on privacy, but the company has been making recent efforts to simplify the overall privacy experience. It’s really interesting that Google didn’t want to work with Facebook and instead chose to place the importance of their search results over privacy concerns from users.
Tweet of the day comes from Ed Bott, talking about the whole breakdown between Facebook and Google he said:
“I mean, when Facebook says your privacy policies are troublesome, you know you’ve crossed a line”
Facebook’s Graph Search has a lot of promise to be a useful tool, mostly because of the amount of data that users have made Facebook privy too. This partnership with Bing should help boost their overall standing in the search engine wars.
A win for Bing and a loss for Google. Now whether or not you decided to use Facebook is entirely up to you. It’s just worth highlighting when an awesome deal like this comes up. No word yet when we can expect this in the Windows Phone Facebook app. We’ll let you know when it does come.
Source: Talking Points Memo
