A slightly suspense and a surprise announcement.

Graph Search is designed to provide users with answers to questions about people, photos, places, and interests

It was a somewhat suspense and predictable release. Facebook has issued a small number of invitations, inviting the media to take part in the first major launch after Facebook's listing. The invitation did not disclose the content, sparking widespread speculation in the world, Fa Video: Facebook Graph search Video Media Source: Sina Technology Cebook mobile phone and social search is recognized as the most likely release products.

local time Tuesday 10 o'clock in the morning (Beijing time Wednesday 2 o'clock in the morning), Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg Zuckerberg the unveiling of the mysterious new product. The answer is social search graph Search--facebook, which formally enters the search field, challenges Google, the web search hegemon, and finds a new solution to how to use its huge social database.

As the undisputed Big Mac of social networking sites, the 9-year-old Facebook has spread across almost every country and region in the world. 1 billion users, 240 billion photos, 1 trillion relationships, these data and users are Facebook's most valuable assets, and how to analyze and use large amounts of data is the biggest challenge for all social networking sites.

Three pillars and social search

In Mr Zuckerberg's words, "the way to use Facebook is to open the browser and find new things that friends share." But Facebook is a community, a database of user life snippets, and with new product graph Search,facebook again in the forefront of the industry, the first to launch a truly valuable social search, so that social networking sites closer to the real life.

Analyze Facebook's ecosystem, which includes three pillars: the flow of information (Newsfeed), the dynamics of friends around them, the timeline (Timeline), the progression of a friend's series, preferences (like), friends ' interests and preferences, and the content of their uploaded images. Among the three pillars, preferences are at the heart of Facebook and even social networking sites. If you provide users with search tools to help them find answers to their life's questions from the pieces of life they share, the images they upload, the things they like, that's what graph search is all about.

This is a new tool to help users find useful information about Facebook. Simply put, Graph search includes friends searching, photo search, location search, and preference search. Users can search for friends according to their own needs, for example, on the weekend night to meet friends, you can directly search "I like the three countries in Beijing Chaoyang City to kill friends," Graph search will be from the user's personal interest in the classification can be about to play friends.

Photo searches are arranged according to preferences, comments, and other tags. For example, users can search for "photos taken by palace" or "photos taken by my friends before 1990", looking at a friend as a child. This search is similar to Google's image search, but Facebook's image search comes only from photos you've been allowed to see.

Location information search provides users with information about the location of their friends in the relevant locations, such as "Three Li Tun Sanlitun" such a popular place. Facebook has also launched a site-related comment function for users, which is clearly a reference to Google's life search or Yelp comment information. Driven by Facebook's huge user base and social search, perhaps Facebok will soon be the dominant force in the field of comment.

More significant is the preference (like) search, which is the most effective tool for using Facebook's social information. To see a movie in the evening, users can search for "my friend's favorite TV series and movies" in graph searches to determine the highest rated "junior pie" and go to the cinema. Gossip users can search for "it programmers like TV dramas and movies," or "photographers like hosts." Cargo users can search for "My friends ' approved restaurant" or "My Sichuan friends like hotpot Shop" to find the most agreeable restaurant to eat.

Join Bing to challenge Google

In the traditional network search domain, Google occupies an absolute dominant position. Google accounted for 66.7% of the U.S. search market in December, according to the market research firm comscore, and Microsoft Bing, which has been trying to hit Google for years, occupies only 16.3%. In the global market, Google's market share is more than 70%. It can be said that without revolutionary new search tools, Google's dominance in the search field is hard to shake.

A new search tool that can challenge Google includes voice searches for Apple Siri and Facebook's latest social search. Social search is not a term, and internet search has already added a lot of social networking content elements. Microsoft's Bing has previously collaborated with Facebook to display the content of Facebook friends on the search results side, but this is not really a social search, and social content is just a recommendation.

True social search can only come from social networking sites such as Facebook, with huge volumes of information about users, images, reviews, and geographic locations that can provide users with the most realistic search results. This search is not a web search, Web search only provides directions to the answer, users must find their own answers, and graph search directly provided the answer, the answer comes from the life of friends to share.

For social searches that do not provide answers, Facebook recommends that users use Microsoft Bing for external Web search. Facebook has maintained a good relationship with Microsoft, which has been a Facebook investor and has been working together for years to fight against a common rival, Google. This Facebook social search, together with Microsoft's Bing search, may bring real pressure to Google.

In the question-and-answer session, Mr. Zuckerberg downplayed the issues involved with Microsoft and Google, "we have a pleasant relationship with Microsoft Bing and we are willing to work with any company as long as they respect the privacy of Facebook users." But it is clear that Facebook will not co-operate with Google, but with Microsoft Bing, which is not as technologically inferior but has a smaller market share.

Be able to challenge Google in the Internet arena, and perhaps only Facebook. Or comscore, where Facebook users spend up to 400 minutes a month on the site, and Google's social networking site, the 3-minute figure, is poor. If users can find directly valid, friend-related search results on Facebook, they don't need to search for keywords through google, and then open the links to find the information they need. In search of life related information, social search is more than web search has a huge advantage.

Technical challenges and profitability prospects

The published graph search also hangs the label of the test, which means that the technology is not yet mature and still in the testing phase. Facebook has also announced that social search is now being launched only for small segments of users, but will be gradually open to the public in the coming weeks or months. In addition, the product is limited to the Web version, mobile version temporarily does not have social search function. "We're still in a very early stage," Zuckerberg said at the press conference.

He is not humble. Social search involves friends, location, user preferences, comments, and tags, which is a huge technical challenge, given Facebook's massive users. In addition, privacy has become a major problem in social search. Privacy has always been the Achilles heel of Facebook, and the recent Instagram of Facebook's image application has led users to leave in droves because of the privacy issue.

Clearly, Facebook cannot ignore privacy issues in social search. "Every part of Graph search is for different users, and most of the content is private and can only be searched for what you are allowed to browse," Zuckerberg said. In other words, what the user is searching for is what they can see, and what they can't see is not displayed in the search results. Zuckerberg says Facebook data center 10% CPU performance is used for computing privacy.

Facebook, which has been dismal since its IPO last May, fell from its 38-dollar IPO price to a 18-dollar slump last September. As users continue to visit websites through mobile devices, the growth of ad revenue in the web is slowing, which is the main reason for Facebook's lower share price. But Facebook continued to move higher after the Zuckerberg series and a boost to his good performance report, which has now rebounded to a 30-dollar hurdle.

The published social search graph will provide Facebook with a new growth area, giving Facebok a future upside. Facebook will release its latest earnings report by the end of this month. According to analysts, Facebook is expected to perform well in the quarter, with revenues close to $1.52 billion trillion, up from $1.26 billion in the third quarter. Brokerages such as JPMorgan Chase up Facebook's ratings, bullish on Facebook's future prospects on the mobile side.