Facebook Graph Search

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Facebook Graph Search feature Facebook Graph Search.jpg
Facebook Graph Search feature

Facebook Graph Search was a semantic search engine that Facebook introduced in March 2013. It was designed to give answers to user natural language queries rather than a list of links. [1] The name refers to the social graph nature of Facebook, which maps the relationships among users. The Graph Search feature combined the big data acquired from its over one billion users and external data into a search engine providing user-specific search results. In a presentation headed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it was announced that the Graph Search algorithm finds information from within a user's network of friends. Microsoft's Bing search engine provided additional results. [2] In July it was made available to all users using the U.S. English version of Facebook. [3] After being made less publicly visible starting December 2014, the original Graph Search was almost entirely deprecated in June 2019. [4]

Contents

History

Initial development

The feature was developed under former Google employees Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky. [1]

The Graph Search Features was launched in Beta in January 2013 as a limited preview for some English users in the United States. [5] [6] Company reports indicate that the service launched to between tens and hundreds of thousands of users.

The feature has been released only to limited users, with a slow expansion planned. Facebook announced plans for a future mobile interface and the inclusion of Instagram photos. [1]

In late September 2013, Facebook announced that it would begin rolling out search for posts and comments as part of Graph Search. [7] [8] [9] [10] The rollout began in October 2013, but many people who had Graph Search were not given immediate access to this feature. [8] [11] A post on the Facebook Engineering blog explained that the huge amount of post and comment data, coming to a total of 700 TB, meant that developing Graph Search for posts was substantially more challenging than the original Graph Search. [12]

Removal from public visibility from December 2014 onward

In December 2014, Facebook changed its search features, dropping partnership with Bing. [13] Around the same time, Facebook changed the way searches could be done through the website and app, obscuring some of the previous graph search functionality, but most of the functionality was still available through direct construction of the search urls. [14]

Over the next few years, the online intelligence community, investigative journalists, and criminal investigators developed tools and practices to more effectively use Facebook Graph Search despite it not being publicly visible. [4] One of these, Stalkscan, received media attention. [15] [16] Graph.tips was a frequently used tool in the online intelligence community as an interface on top of Facebook Graph Search. [17] [18] [4]

Deprecation of most functionality in June 2019

In early June 2019, the feature was further deprecated, with the majority of URLs for graph search queries no longer working. [4] Facebook explained this by saying: "The vast majority of people on Facebook search using keywords, a factor which led us to pause some aspects of graph search and focus more on improving keyword search. We are working closely with researchers to make sure they have the tools they need to use our platform." [4] [19] However, there was speculation that the shutdown of Graph Search may also have been motivated by privacy concerns. [4]

Many tools that depended on Facebook Graph Search, including Stalkscan and graph.tips, had much of their functionality stop working, though some tools were updated using complicated workarounds for some queries. [4] Vice quoted Bellingcat's Nick Waters as saying: "Now that Graph Search has gone down, it's become evident that it's used by some incredibly important section[s] of society, from human rights investigators and citizens wanting to hold their countries to account, to police investigating people trafficking and sexual slavery, to emergency responders." [4]

Operation

Graph Search operated by use of a search algorithm similar to traditional search engines such as Google. However, the search feature is distinguished as a semantic search engine, searching based on intended meaning. Rather than returning results based on matching keywords, the search engine is designed to match phrases, as well as objects on the site. [20]

Search results were based on both the content of the user and their friends’ profiles and the relationships between the user and their friends. Results were based on the friends and interests expressed on Facebook, and also shaped by users’ privacy settings. In addition to being restricted from seeing some content, users could sometimes view relevant content made publicly available by users not listed as friends. [21]

Entries into the search bar were auto-completed as users typed, with Facebook suggesting friends and second degree connections, Facebook pages, automatically generated topics, and Web searches for anything Facebook was not able to search for. [22]

The operation of the search feature depended on user involvement. The feature was intended to encourage users to add more friends, more quickly. In doing so, it could provide updating, more data-rich results and stimulate use of the feature. [5]

Search functions

Facebook supported searches for the following types:

The feature also allowed users to search the web directly. [23]

Examples

Tom Stocky of the search team offered several examples of potential queries during the launch presentation, including,

During its roll-out stage, bloggers showed how Facebook Graph Search could be used to uncover potentially embarrassing information (e.g., companies employing people who like racism) or illegal interests (e.g., Chinese residents who like the banned group Falun Gong). [24] [25]

Microsoft was partnered with Facebook to provide search results from 2008 to 2014. Microsoft Live Search came to be known as Bing following the initiation of the partnership. In 2010, Facebook and Bing partnered to offer socially oriented search results: ‘People Search’ and ‘Liked by your Facebook Friends’ information appeared in results within Facebook and on Bing.com. [26]

In May 2012, Bing launched a social sidebar feature which displayed Facebook content alongside of search results. Promoted on the basis of asking friends for advice, the feature allows users to broadcast queries related to their searches to Facebook friends, and offers recommendations of Facebook friends, as well as experts from other networks who could be capable of offering insight. [27]

The previously developed Instant Personalization feature integrated friends’ publicly available information, such as likes, into content on other external websites, such as Rotten Tomatoes and Yelp. [28]

The emergence of the Graph Search feature builds on this partnership. Facebook content remains on Bing.com. The focus of Graph Search is internal content, but Bing continues to issue search results of external content. The external search results are based on traditional keyword-match. [29]

Advertising

In 2012, Facebook introduced sponsored pages in search results. By buying "Targeted Entities" on Facebook, advertisers pay to have their page appear when users search for that entity. [30] Facebook CEO Zuckerberg reported that this would remain a feature of the search feature, but that the advertising component had not been extended in the Graph Search feature. [20]

Criticisms arose about the integrity of search results on the basis of "buying likes". This practice refers to situations in which companies, without sponsoring results, accumulate a large number of "likes" through practices such as promotions or paying to operate bot accounts. Critics argued that this rendered results allegedly based on other users’ opinions meaningless. [31]

Open Graph

The Open Graph feature allows developers to integrate their applications and pages into the Facebook platform, and links Facebook with external sites on the Internet. The feature operates by allowing the addition of metadata to turn websites into graph objects. Actions made using the app are expressed on users’ profile pages. [32]

Privacy

Initial reactions to the launch of Graph Search included many concerns about privacy. [31] [33] [34] The social media analytics company Crimson Hexagon reported that 19 percent of users discussing the launch of the feature were stating concerns about privacy. [35] Facebook has alluded to these concerns and emphasized that the search operates within the pre-existing privacy settings: users can access only the information already available to them. [21] The feature makes this information easier and potentially more appealing to find. [35] Related concerns about phishing and the appearance of minors in search results have also been expressed. [23] [34] [36]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Search</span> Search engine from Google

Google Search is a search engine operated by Google. It allows users to search for information on the Internet by entering keywords or phrases. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query. It is the most popular search engine worldwide.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metasearch engine</span> Online information retrieval tool

A metasearch engine is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, ranked, and presented to the users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spotlight (Apple)</span> macOS search feature

Spotlight is a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's macOS and iOS operating systems. Spotlight is a selection-based search system, which creates an index of all items and files on the system. It is designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on the computer, including documents, pictures, music, applications, and System Settings. In addition, specific words in documents and in web pages in a web browser's history or bookmarks can be searched. It also allows the user to narrow down searches with creation dates, modification dates, sizes, types and other attributes. Spotlight also offers quick access to definitions from the built-in New Oxford American Dictionary and to calculator functionality. There are also command-line tools to perform functions such as Spotlight searches.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Startpage.com</span> Privacy-focused search engine based in the Netherlands

Startpage is a Dutch search engine company that highlights privacy as its distinguishing feature. The website advertises that it allows users to obtain Google Search results while protecting users' privacy by not storing personal information or search data and removing all trackers. Startpage.com also includes an Anonymous View browsing feature that allows users the option to open search results via proxy for increased anonymity.

Yahoo! Search is a search engine owned and operated by Yahoo!, using Microsoft Bing to power results.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising. SEM may incorporate search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content and site architecture to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages to enhance pay per click (PPC) listings and increase the Call to action (CTA) on the website.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Search engine</span> Software system for finding relevant information on the Web

A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images. Users also have the option of limiting the search to a specific type of results, such as images, videos, or news.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Bing</span> Web search engine developed by Microsoft

Microsoft Bing, commonly referred to as Bing, is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service traces its roots back to Microsoft's earlier search engines, including MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. Bing offers a broad spectrum of search services, encompassing web, video, image, and map search products, all developed using ASP.NET.

A search engine results page (SERP) is a webpage that is displayed by a search engine in response to a query by a user. The main component of a SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Images</span> Image search engine by Google Inc.

Google Images is a search engine owned by Google that allows users to search the World Wide Web for images. It was introduced on July 12, 2001, due to a demand for pictures of the green Versace dress of Jennifer Lopez worn in February 2000. In 2011, reverse image search functionality was added.

Social search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches user-generated content such as news, videos and images related search queries on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Flickr. It is an enhanced version of web search that combines traditional algorithms. The idea behind social search is that instead of ranking search results purely based on semantic relevance between a query and the results, a social search system also takes into account social relationships between the results and the searcher. The social relationships could be in various forms. For example, in LinkedIn people search engine, the social relationships include social connections between searcher and each result, whether or not they are in the same industries, work for the same companies, belong the same social groups, and go the same schools, etc.

Keyword research is a practice search engine optimization (SEO) professionals use to find and analyze search terms that users enter into search engines when looking for products, services, or general information. Keywords are related to search queries.

The Facebook Platform is the set of services, tools, and products provided by the social networking service Facebook for third-party developers to create their own applications and services that access data in Facebook.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DuckDuckGo</span> American software company and Web search engine

DuckDuckGo is an American software company that offers a number of products intended to help people protect their online privacy. The flagship product is a search engine that has been praised by privacy advocates. Subsequent products include extensions for popular web browsers and a new web browser.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reverse image search</span> Content-based image retrieval

Reverse image search is a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) query technique that involves providing the CBIR system with a sample image that it will then base its search upon; in terms of information retrieval, the sample image is very useful. In particular, reverse image search is characterized by a lack of search terms. This effectively removes the need for a user to guess at keywords or terms that may or may not return a correct result. Reverse image search also allows users to discover content that is related to a specific sample image or the popularity of an image, and to discover manipulated versions and derivative works.

Personalized search is a web search tailored specifically to an individual's interests by incorporating information about the individual beyond the specific query provided. There are two general approaches to personalizing search results, involving modifying the user's query and re-ranking search results.

Contextual search is a form of optimizing web-based search results based on context provided by the user and the computer being used to enter the query. Contextual search services differ from current search engines based on traditional information retrieval that return lists of documents based on their relevance to the query. Rather, contextual search attempts to increase the precision of results based on how valuable they are to individual users.

Search engine scraping is the process of harvesting URLs, descriptions, or other information from search engines. This is a specific form of screen scraping or web scraping dedicated to search engines only.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Searx</span> Metasearch engine

Searx is a free and open-source metasearch engine, available under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, with the aim of protecting the privacy of its users. To this end, Searx does not share users' IP addresses or search history with the search engines from which it gathers results. Tracking cookies served by the search engines are blocked, preventing user-profiling-based results modification. By default, Searx queries are submitted via HTTP POST, to prevent users' query keywords from appearing in webserver logs. Searx was inspired by the Seeks project, though it does not implement Seeks' peer-to-peer user-sourced results ranking.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Facebook Announces Its Third Pillar "Graph Search" That Gives You Answers, Not Links Like Google". TechCrunch. 15 January 2013. Retrieved 16 January 2013.
  2. ↑ Tsukayama, Hayley (January 15, 2013). "Facebook introduces social search feature". The Washington Post. Retrieved 16 January 2013.
  3. ↑ Facebook Graph Search by Rosa Golijan, NBC News, July 9, 2013
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Cox, Joseph (June 10, 2019). "Facebook Quietly Changes Search Tool Used by Investigators, Abused By Companies. Facebook's Graph Search allowed anyone to search a wealth of public data on Facebook in very specific ways, such as searching content for keywords in a particular point in time". Vice. Retrieved June 15, 2019.
  5. 1 2 Van Grove, J. (2013, January 15). Facebook Graph Search: First Impressions. CNET.
  6. ↑ Stocky, Tom; Rasmussen, Lars (15 January 2013). "Introducing Graph Search Beta". Newsroom. Facebook. Retrieved 27 September 2016.
  7. ↑ "Graph Search Now Includes Posts and Status Updates". Facebook. September 20, 2013. Retrieved January 21, 2014.
  8. 1 2 "Facebook Starts Rollout Of Graph Search For Posts, Comments, Check-Ins To Reveal The Past And Present". September 30, 2013. Retrieved January 21, 2014.
  9. ↑ "SCREENSHOTS: Facebook's New Search Feature". allfacebook.com.
  10. ↑ Ken Yeung (30 September 2013). "Facebook Graph Search Now Helps You Find Posts And Status Updates". The Next Web.
  11. ↑ Slegg, Jennifer (October 3, 2013). "Facebook Graph Search Now Lets You Search for Posts, Status Updates, Check-ins, Comments" . Retrieved January 21, 2014.
  12. ↑ "Under the Hood: Building posts search". Facebook Engineering. October 24, 2013. Retrieved January 21, 2014.
  13. ↑ Mariella Moon. "Facebook's updated search tool leaves out Bing results". Engadget. AOL.
  14. ↑ "Important Facebook Graph Search Developments". February 1, 2015. Retrieved June 15, 2019.
  15. ↑ "Stalkscan Reveals All the Info You Can Search for on Facebook". Lifehacker. February 17, 207. Retrieved June 15, 2019.
  16. ↑ Verma, Adarsh (February 15, 2017). "Stalkscan Is A Creepy Tool That Exposes All Your Facebook Public Information In One Click" . Retrieved June 15, 2019.
  17. ↑ "Facebook Graph Searching" . Retrieved June 15, 2019.
  18. ↑ "Online Research Tools". Global Investigative Journalism Network. Retrieved June 15, 2019.
  19. ↑ Shu, Catherine (June 10, 2019). "Changes to Facebook Graph Search leaves online investigators in a lurch". TechCrunch. Retrieved June 15, 2019.
  20. 1 2 Van Grove, J. (2013, January 15). Facebook takes on Google with Graph Search. CNET.
  21. 1 2 "How Privacy Works with Graph Search". Facebook. 2013. Archived from the original on 16 January 2013. Retrieved 10 October 2017.
  22. ↑ "Hands on with Facebook Graph Search". Digital Trends. 2013-01-25. Retrieved 2024-03-22.
  23. 1 2 "Search – Facebook Developers" (2013). Facebook. <https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/search/>.
  24. ↑ Oremus, Will (23 January 2013). "The Funny, Embarrassing, and Disturbing Ways People Can Use Facebook's New Search Tool". Slate. Retrieved 23 January 2013.
  25. ↑ Mlot, Stephanie. "Bizarre Facebook Graph Search Results Get the Tumblr Treatment". PC Magazine. Retrieved 23 January 2013.
  26. ↑ Ballard, Mark. (31 Jan. 2013). "Will Facebook’s Graph Search Be Big For Bing Advertisers?" Search Engine Land. < http://searchengineland.com/will-facebooks-graph-search-be-big-for-bing-advertisers-146921>.
  27. ↑ "Introducing the New Bing: Spend Less Time Searching, More Time Doing". (10 May 2012). Bing. Microsoft, Inc. <https://blogs.bing.com/search/2012/05/10/introducing-the-new-bing-spend-less-time-searching-more-time-doing/>.
  28. ↑ "Instant Personalization" (2013). Facebook. <https://www.facebook.com/instantpersonalization/>.
  29. ↑ Facebook launches a "social" search engine that filters contents of shared content (In Spanish). http://larepublica.pe
  30. ↑ Wilson, Emily. (31 Jan. 2013). "Facebook Sponsored Results: An Under-Explored Opportunity". MarketingLand. AOL Tech. < http://marketingland.com/facebook-sponsored-results-31940>.
  31. 1 2 Carlson, Nicholas. (17 Jan. 2013). "Facebook's Search Is Based On A 'Con'." Business Insider. <http://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-search-results-will-be-totally-irrelevant-because-likes-are-50-fake-2013-1>.
  32. ↑ "Open Graph Overview" (2013). Facebook. <https://developers.facebook.com/docs/concepts/opengraph/overview/>.
  33. ↑ Decugis, Guillame. (22 Jan. 2013). "The Big Problem With Facebook's Graph Search: Privacy Constraints." Fast Company. < http://www.fastcompany.com/3004952/big-problem-facebooks-graph-search-privacy-constraints>.
  34. 1 2 Gonsalves, A. (2013, January 25). Facebook’s Graph Search Worries Security Experts. Network World.
  35. 1 2 O’Reilly, Lara. (18 Jan. 2013). "Facebook's Graph Search could be Google's gain". MarketingWeek. <https://www.marketingweek.com/facebooks-graph-search-could-be-googles-gain/>.
  36. ↑ Bradley, Tony. (16 Jan. 2013). "Facebook Graph Search is and awesome tool for phishing attacks." PCWorld. <http://www.pcworld.com/article/2025397/facebook-graph-search-is-an-awesome-tool-for-phishing-attacks.html>.

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