Facebook is trying to make it easier to find a months-old photo or restaurant recommendation, half remembered from a friend’s feed, and unearth other information buried within your social network with a tool it calls Graph Search, Vindu Goel reports in The New York Times.
On Monday, the company will roll out the feature to its several hundred million users in the United States and to others who use the American English version of the site. Other languages will follow.
Developing a sophisticated search feature is vital to Facebook’s long-term success, both to deepen users’ engagement and to make it more appealing to advertisers.
Experts say Facebook’s technical achievement so far is impressive. Privacy could still be an issue as more user data becomes easily accessible, however, and the feature is dependent on Facebook users volunteering more information about their likes and dislikes.
In a Bits blog post, Mr. Goel also writes of some of the tool’s limitations — that it tends to be too literal, and lacks the intuitiveness that people increasingly expect.