Facebook search isn’t just about finding your friends, events, and favorite media anymore. It’s turning into a full-fledged web search and sites are racing to optimize themselves for it. And Facebook may by the first to pull off semantic search in a truly successful way.
Facebook’s search engine will be centered upon the site’s “Open Graph.” The Open Graph is basically just Facebook’s term for the web of sites that are all linked to Facebook through “like”-ability, even though they are not technically Facebook pages. Any time you see a like button on a non-Facebook page, that’s part of the Open Graph.
That means that the Open Graph search engine will be far more likely to know what you’re looking for, because it will be scouring options that have been liked by you before. Facebook search knows what you tend to want to see and can present you with the results most relevant to your interests. And while some search engines tend to put the most linked results at the top, Facebook can put the most liked results at the top.
With over 400 million users, Facebook is in the best position of anyone to actually pull off its quest of the social semantic search. As Facebook starts to roll out the new search functionality, expect a lot of your favorite sites to join the Open Graph if they haven’t already and to optimize themselves for the Facebook search system. After all, 400 million people is a lot of searchers to tap into.
(Via AllFacebook)
