Facebook’s Bold, Compelling and Scary Engine of Discovery: The Inside Story of Graph Search

To date, sorting through your Facebook friends could be a frustrating task. Although the site has a search bar, there has been no easy way to quickly cull contacts based on specific criteria. But Facebook’s Graph Search will eventually allow a billion people to dive into the vast trove of stored information about them and their network of friends.

For years now, Facebook watchers have wondered when the company would unleash the potential of its underpowered search bar. (Nobody has feared this day more than Google, which suddenly faces a competitor able to index tons of data that Google’s own search engine can’t access.) They have also wondered how a Facebook search product might work. Now we know. Graph Search is fundamentally different from web search. Instead of a Google-like effort to help users find answers from a stitched-together corpus of all the world’s information, Facebook is helping them tap its vast, monolithic database to make better use of their “social graph.”