United States-based Facebook users are now all getting access to Graph Search, the company said in an e-mail this morning.
“Search on Facebook just got a lot more fun with Graph Search rolling out to people who have their language set to U.S. English on the service. … Happy searching!” wrote a rep.
Graph Search is a new kind of search that competes with just about every search service out there. It’s Google, LinkedIn, Yelp, and a half dozen other services all rolled into one.
It works by enabling you to browse through certain kinds of connections in your own social network as well as the wider world of people, places, and things on Facebook. For example, you can search for friends of friends who are single women. Or friends who work at Microsoft’s San Francisco office. Or Austin restaurants your friends liked, or photos of your friends in Paris.
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On the tech side, Graph Search has everything to do with structured data, and giving structure to its massive amounts of text- and image-based data is one of Facebook’s biggest information goals.
Graph Search is still in beta, and today’s rollout includes members in the U.S. who use Facebook in English only. Other locations and languages are coming soon.
Facebook also started rolling out hashtags, another big bid on structuring data around current events and themes in social media.
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