Facebook has been long rumoured to expand its improved search feature, also known as Graph Search, to mobile platforms. And now Facebook has finally started testing out Graph Search on mobile devices, with select users.
Mashable reporter Seth Fiegerman, first spotted the change and posted the screenshot of the new interface – which heavily resembled to web version of Graph Search.
What is it all about?
Facebook had launched Graph Search for web users last year. Graph Search focuses on four core points – people, places, photos and interests. Recently, Facebook added posts and status updates in the Graph Search. The search aims to deliver more relevant information and images on the social network.
Despite mobile being a top priority, Facebook hasn’t launched a mobile version of the Graph Search as of yet. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg during the recent quarter earnings call explained why Facebook hadn’t rushed to roll out the Graph Search on other platforms.
He was quoted saying: “We’re really early in the game on [Graph Search]. You can see that because we haven’t even really rolled out our mobile version of Graph Search yet and we’re a mobile company. Pretty soon, you should expect us to roll out the mobile version of this. I think that’s going to be an important step because most of the usage of Facebook overall is on mobile,” he said.
Rolling out Graph Search to mobile devices will help Facebook analyse the things its users are interested, and help determine what’s hot on the social network much more precisely. Graph Search will make it much more easier to find things on the social network if you take a look at it from a users perspective and help engage in more activities on the network.
How does Graph Search work?
Since Facebook Graph Search is a semantic search engine, it is developed in such a way that it has the ability to provide answers to natural language queries. The basis for this is the use of development in the field of Natural Language Processing.
Basically, Facebook’s Graph Search feature uses a combination of data that Facebook has gained over time from its huge user-base and the data available externally from its primary search engine to provide results pertaining to the user itself. The results that are generated using Graph Search are based completely on a user’s friend network. This type of search promises results that will always relate to the user in one way or another.
Search bar entries get auto-completed as users type their queries into it while Facebook suggests pages, related topics , second degree connections and also web searches to provide the you with a result even before you may have completely gathered your thoughts on the query.
The bigger picture!
Google, Microsoft and Apple have all been successful in their attempts at running NLP applications on the mobile landscape but with Graph Search for mobile, Facebook can now provide something that can be a turning-point for search as a whole.
Though this is all still under development and would require some time to flourish, it’s still something new to build upon. Let’s wait and see how it pans out.
