Facebooks neue Suche, Graph Search, ist abhängig von den Daten, die Facebook zur Verfügung stehen. Likes, Verbindungen, Angaben zur Person. Das hat Vorteile (zum ersten Mal überhaupt ist so eine Suche im großen Stil dank Facebook möglich) und Nachteile (die Suche ist nur so gut, wie man selbst Informationen in das System gesteckt hat). Der Suchmaschinenexperte Danny Sullivan:
Consider me. Not only have I not liked my electrician, my plumber, my dentist, my doctor or my tax person on Facebook but I don't even know if they have Facebook pages. I have nothing to offer to my Facebook friends in this regard. Similarly, despite the huge number of books I read through my Kindle, I never go to like those books on Facebook, so books I love are more or less invisible on Facebook. Facebook itself understands this challenge, but it's hoping the promise of what search can provide will help encourage people to build the connections they may lack now. "There are now new reasons to make these connections. We're hoping the existence of that will encourage it," said Tom Stocky, director of product management at Facebook, who has worked closely on the Facebook search product. "But absolutely, early on, that [your degree of connectedness] will make the experience you have with this vary."
Ich würde bezweifeln, dass die User über mehrere Ecken an den Suchnutzen denkend mehr Informationen in Facebook stecken. Das ist aber wahrscheinlich auch egal. Denn es kann auf absehbare Zeit keine vergleichbare Suchmaschine geben.
Die neue Suche ist auch unabhängig davon eine bessere Suche für Facebook:
If the utility to use Facebook as a type of super-Yelp or super-LinkedIn doesn't prove itself at first, at the very least, Facebook Graph Search will allow people to search within Facebook itself in a better way than they can now. For example, people will be able to find all the photos they've liked on Facebook. "This is one of the best queries in the system," Lars Rasmussen told me, the former Googler that Facebook lured away to be director of engineering, and who's overseen the Facebook search project. "You probably like a couple of photos a day, but you've never been able to see a collection of them before."
Da Graph Search als eingeschränkter Betatest zunächst nur im englischsprachigen Raum eingeführt wird, dauert es wohl noch eine Weile, bis die neue Facebooksuche hierzulande ankommen wird.