Facebook users in the US will soon start getting Graph Search – a new search tool announced in January this year that is designed to take a precise query and deliver an answer.
According to an ABC News report, Facebook said that several hundreds of millions of people will get the feature this week, though it will be a few weeks before it reaches everyone who uses the site in the “US English” setting.
The search feature was made available as a limited preview for English audiences only back in January. According to ABC News, Facebook says in a blog post which will be published on Monday morning: “Over the past few months, tens of millions of people have helped improve the product just by using it and giving feedback.”
Such improvements include the speed of search to accuracy — when you start typing in a search term now the tool will suggest more relevant possible searches, and can better understand what people are searching for in order to display the most relevant results first.
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Facebook’s Graph Search allows users to search for content from their friends that has been shared with them, such as photos, information and things that have been liked by their friends. As we reported before, to give two very random examples, it is possible to search for things such as “TV shows watched by doctors” or “Music liked by people who like Mitt Romney”.
The ABC News report says that Facebook is still working on making posts or status updates and comments searchable, with the mobile version also still in the works.
As with any new feature from the world’s largest social network, privacy is a key concern for users. Facebook took extra care to set the record straight early on when it launched Graph Search, with Mark Zuckerberg saying that user privacy was taken into account when designing the search feature. In fact, Facebook started prompting users to take a look at their privacy settings when it announced Graph Search.
Facebook also recently released an inside look at its Entity Graph, a complicated data set which maps the social network’s 100+ billion connections between people, places and interests, helping to power its Graph Search feature.
Image Credit: Stephen Lam via Getty Images
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