There is a Facebook 'Introducing Graph Search' page that has information about the new search facility. There is a button the bottom of the page to ask to be considered for the beta test (only a limited number of people will be able to use it at first to iron out the bugs and get feedback). Also on the page is a 'Try a search' link to try out a sample search. It searches for 'People who live in San Francisco, California'. Try it and see what results it comes up with.
I find that it displays a list of people I don't know. I can see the connection with some of the results and it says '1 mutual friend', but others appear to have no connection to me or my interests. I can't see a lot of use for the information. If I am planning a trip to San Francisco, am I supposed to contact these people directly? Should I message them and ask if they want to meet up? How would they feel about a stranger contacting them?
An example search I saw somewhere was that you could search and list all single males or all single females. So, I could discover and message single females that live in a certain area? This is getting a bit creepy.
Some of the other examples that Facebook gives are equally odd. For example, take this one: 'My friends who like surfing'. Honestly, do you not know which of your friends like surfing? Do you not talk to them? Equally odd is 'My friends who live in San Francisco'. This is similar to people search above, but as it is a friends search it begs the question, do you not know where your friends live? If you don't know this basic information then are they really friends?
I think this type of search facility is more useful with a social network like LinkedIn. This is a collection of business and professional contacts, some of which you may know very little about apart from their company and position. You may have had business dealings with them, but they aren't really friends. Facebook's search would be quite useful in this situation.
Some people use Facebook this way and I have seen people with as many as 3,000 friends. They aren't friends though. People tend to have a dozen friends and perhaps a couple of dozen more people they know well. The rest are people you once shared a classroom with, worked at the same company, acquaintances that you never really see in the real world, and so on.
I think Graph Search is something that Facebook needs and it can be useful on occasions to search for information among friends, but I don't really see it as a big deal or something I will use every day. It's not going to change the world. However, I do think it will change how we look at Facebook privacy. Many people will head for the privacy settings and see what changes they can make to make sure they aren't in search results. Many more people either won't bother or don't know how to change the settings and they share far too much information. It'll be interesting to see what happens when Graph Search is rolled out to Facebook's 1 billion users.
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