Facebook’s Graph Search

Is the launch of this search tool an attempt to mask yet another intrusion into privacy?

Search graphs seem to be heating up rapidly, after Google’s lukewarm foray into the area, Facebook has announced a much more flamboyant entry into the field by unveiling Facebook Graph Search. FB’s Graph Search is widely being touted as a generational upgrade above the present version of search, which allows for only the most rudimentary of customisations.

Graph search will combine Google style natural language support as well as interpret associative searches. When Graph search goes online, you will be able to perform searches by typing sentences into the search bar, such as: “Friends who live in Hyderabad” “Restaurants my friends like” “Friends living in Delhi, who are fans of Apple”

And receive results accordingly.

While an improvement to Facebook’s search system has been long awaited, the upgrade seems to be a double-edged sword. Facebook is notorious among the tech team here for playing fast and loose with the unstated laws of customer privacy, often changing privacy rules to the detriment of the consumer without giving them any kind of notice, and this case is no exception.

Just before launching the graph search, Facebook declared that it had removed the ability of users to hide their profiles from being visible on Facebook search results. The company justified this decision by saying that only a single digit percentage of users actually use the ‘hide from search’ feature. Of course, for a social network with over a billion users this means that at least 10 million people, and up to a staggering 100 million, could be affected by this policy change.