New opportunities for Facebook's Big data release

A few days ago, there was much speculation about what new products Facebook would launch.

The answer is now.

Facebook held a press conference in Tuesday (January 15) at Menlo headquarters, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the introduction of the graph Search tool.

Graph Search

This is the most important product that Facebook has launched since its launch in May 2012, and its distinguishing feature from ordinary search is that it is a search that is closely related to users. It is Facebook's response to 1 billion users, 240 billion photos and 1 trillion page visits, designed to provide users with answers to questions about people, photos, places, and interests (and four dimensions associated with users).

For example, in the search for "interest" features, you can enter "My friends like movies" or "My friends like the TV series" and other keywords, or search "my friend to the TV drama video." Then graph search will give you a direct answer.

Zuckerberg says there are now three ways to get information on Facebook: News feeds, timeline and graph Search, he said. "People want to know what's going on in the world around them, and that's news Feed." "If you want to know something about people, you can use timeline." And now the third way to do this is to find content by searching, which is graph search.

Zuckerberg insists this is not a web search. For example, in a traditional search, the search keyword "Hip hop" (hip-hop culture) allows users to get links to relevant pages to get information, and in contrast, Graph search returns answers rather than links to answers.

If the product is going well, it will certainly help Facebook's advertisers. In addition, it will be added to the mobile end of Facebook, and the mobile end of the map search will certainly add geographical elements, and even voice search.

Two days ago, the New York Times wrote about the significance of search for Facebook, "in the online advertising industry, search accounts for the largest share of revenue, which is Google's profits reached 10 times times the reason for Facebook." As a result, the social network can be surprisingly profitable as long as it is slightly advanced to the search field. ”

But the stock market seems ungrateful for the product. Facebook's shares fell 2.74% yesterday (January 15), while Google rose slightly by 0.23%. But in terms of the revelation that graph search offers, this irrelevant.

Facebook's energy is not social, but it's connected

"When I first started Facebook, we actually offered some of the same functionality, but it just applied to your school," Zuckerberg said. Facebook can help you get to know your friends and meet new communities because it allows you to keep in touch with people you already know. But it's hard to do it in a school, if it's on the millions and let it happen at the same time. We are transitioning from connecting to the people you want to connect to the people you meet with your acquaintances. Graph Search is a mature version of ' Discovery '. Exploring your community is a core human need and this is the first step in that direction. ”

After the publication of Graph search, the tech blog website PandoDaily that Facebook is still defined as a "social network," but that its real energy is not social, but that it is a "link network." Compared with other social applications or sites, it links 1 billion of users around the world, and the Internet is still connected to a bunch of machines in the physical sense, but Facebook has made it a huge web of "human connections." The authors say Facebook is not successful because it has not yet found a suitable lever to pry the 1 billion users ' energies into action. This release of graph Search may be one of the possibilities of such leverage.

At the same time, Graph search is also a major blow to Sergey's "closed" and "open" debate. By connecting with the people you met, and the people you might be interested in, Facebook has basically become a system, and the information that is retained and circulated is likely to be enough for a person's daily life (such as finding a restaurant, looking for a picture, looking for a job), or even more reliable than the information on the open Internet. , just lack of Facebook helps you dig and present effectively. And once Facebook does the job, you don't need to collect a lot of information on the Open Internet.

If Facebook's mission statement is to "make the world more open and more connected," Let it focus on achieving half of the "link" and the other half, let Google do it.

Of course, for some people, this search may inspire fear and anger that their privacy is violated.

Ambition

Graph search was launched in the spring of 2011. Facebook's search chief, Lars Rasmussen (from Google), remembers Zuckerberg saying to him that Facebook has the opportunity to make a completely different value search engine, specifically and purposefully, to pick up the huge, Information in a structured database. Facebook already has a lot of information, but it's still hard to get users to visit. Who is my friend in New York? What book are you reading? Do you like the Wilco band around here? Which Italian restaurant do people really like? New Search products will answer these queries.

Their ambition is to ask Facebook to answer all the questions the user has, such as "Give me a picture of me and my friend when I visit California for 2010 years." This is a huge technical challenge. But Zuckerberg is still showing great interest.

More than a year from then, Lars Rasmussen and another engineer met Zuckerberg every Friday noon to inform him of the progress. Finally, 50 engineers worked on the project, including two linguists, to help the engine understand people's inquiries.

In an interview with Wired, Zuckerberg said his favorite query was "recruiting." He said, look at the Facebook engineer's friends who are in Google, he entered such a query, and then the results appear. It looks like it's not good news for LinkedIn.

When the Wired reporter asked Zuckerberg whether he thought the number of queries the graph search received would one day match the most important search player on the internet, such as Google, he did not flinch at all and was extremely confident. "Hopefully time will help us achieve this." But we built this because we believe it will be what people want. We still have a lot of things to do. But I think that even if this is just the beginning, people's experience will be: ' Wow, this is great! ”

Short-term shaking Google hard to work

But it is still too early to judge if graph search threatens Google's position. The Forbes website argues that the theory of Graph search is that it is related to the search content because it relates to friends, their personal preferences, their friends, what they do, where things happen, and what they want to do. But all this begs the question, "How much is this a threat to Google?" "In short, there is no big threat to Google until the search results are available on Bing or Yahoo." Facebook will show Bing's two search results, which Bing previously used as a "lite version" of the search tool, but did not do what Facebook is proposing today.

Facebook needs to spend a lot of time and money trying to change the user's search habits on a large scale. How do you encourage you to turn to Facebook from search engines such as Google, Bing or yahoo? So Facebook will need to be like Bing and Yahoo to integrate these search results. After that, its ability to really pose a threat to Google. Google + social networking, although interesting, is small, so Google's social-Atlas search can play a small role.

The Forbes website even suggests that Bing appears to be the most realistic winner of the product. "As more and more users will use Facebook for data querying and searching, Graph search will be massively popular." The increase in search traffic will allow more default Bing search results to appear. As a result, Bing may benefit by gaining market share. ”

On Weibo, Kai-Fu Lee evaluated Facebook's product: 1 The move opens the door to Facebook's most valuable asset (social chain), and 2 searches to open a targeted monetization portal, but takes time, short-sighted Wall Street is too anxious, and 3 future graph search+ Bing can challenge google,4) Graph Search Name Taiji Guest, is a failure, 5 micro-letter as "China Mobile Facebook", can refer to the graph search function.

(Responsible editor: Schpeppen)