Facebook Graph Search — a new tool that brings an Ask Jeeves-like function to the social-networking giant’s search bar — offers tantalizing possibilities. Want to find friends who like both Pulp Fiction and The Sound of Music? Type the question into the search bar and see the photos of your friends, as results, on the left-side of your profile.
What’s their favorite Mexican restaurant in nearby Palo Alto? Results are listed by restaurant, with the “Likes” of friends listed. (The new search might enliven Likes, as friends decide to share everything with everybody, a recurring theme of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.)
Such a panacea of data isn’t just salivating to advertisers and marketers who want to target their ads on Facebook, but a potential broadside to Google, Yelp, Foursquare and Match.com. Even LinkedIn faces competition: Graph Search is a good way, as Facebook demonstrated, to job recruit.
Zuckerberg insists the new feature, which is being slowly rolled out over the next few months, is not a Web search. But as Graph Search develops, it may more closely resemble Google.com, assuming Google integrates Google+ into its search service.
h/t USA Today
