Facebook Calls Up a Search Party - Wall Street Journal

By ROLFE WINKLER Cross Facebook with Google, and theoretically you get an awesome new search tool that can deliver the kind of "word-of-mouth" advertising opportunities that advertisers crave. But to fully realize that potential, Facebook still has a ways to go, and it will need lots of help from users to get there. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced Facebook's new search tool called "graph search." The promise of graph search, which uses the database of social information that Facebook captures on its site, is to answer the questions that a traditional search engine like Google can't compute. A Facebook user might forget the name of someone met at a friend's party, for instance, but does remember that the person is friends with John Smith and went to Yale. A search for "friends of John Smith who went to Yale" will deliver profiles of people fitting that description. Maybe a Facebook user has a trip to Paris planned and wants recommendations from friends on where to stay. The user might reach out to any friends that pop up in a search for "friends that have been to Paris." The commercial potential for such a tool is similar to the service Yelp offers today, though instead of random reviews from strangers on nearby restaurants, Facebook users might find out that a friend has been to the Maggiano's down the road and liked it a lot. That would be much more useful. Graph search is still in an early test phase, and so, to start, Facebook is rolling it out to only a limited number of users and not on mobile. But the social network recently unveiled a similar mobile tool that offers a peek at how graph search can help businesses. Facebook users that tap the "Nearby" tab in its mobile app see a collection of nearby establishments with Facebook pages that are "liked" by the user's friends. Those are potentially very powerful recommendations coming from friends. The challenge for Facebook is that its users may have to create lots more content for its social search tool to be very useful. Right now, it is doubtful that a given Facebook user's few-hundred friends click "like" frequently enough or "check-in" in enough places to create a sufficiently dense database of recommendations. Yelp has thousands of users regularly contributing content; even Google is collecting reviews for its own local search tool. And while Facebook says that over 13 million businesses world-wide have created a page on its site, Yelp claims to have around 20 million business profile pages in the U.S. alone. Even if the commercial potential of Facebook's search engine is limited to start off with, it is still good news for shareholders that the company is investing in such tools to take advantage of the unique data it has linking people's likes and their human relationships. That should boost user engagement, driving revenue. Still, to steal a march on Google in search, Facebook users need to get even more engaged in mapping who, and what, they like. Write to Rolfe Winkler at rolfe.winkler@wsj.com via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNEEK9M7ol7JO_TQqy_VrWmrsgmEow&url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324595704578244193469987744.html

Put the internet to work for you. via Personal Recipe 2598265