The Marketer's Guide to Facebook Graph Search

Social search has long been heralded as the "next big thing." The opportunity to create the search engine for people is too enticing; the prize being held above all others in the race to build the next Google. Facebook is widely recognised as the only company other than the search giant itself capable of creating such a product, and it's one of the key reasons behind its enormous price-to-earnings ratio. Few are investing on the strength of the current format; instead they know that the data it has at its fingertips could be world-changing in terms of information retrieval and advertising. And that project began in earnest, publicly at least, with the launch of Graph Search in 2013. At the time the product lacked any significant features and after a short fanfare, marketers' focus shifted elsewhere. The engineers, however, had very clear instructions to iterate, fast, and the results of that work are now starting to float to the surface. Graph Search is Facebook's way of mapping all the data we give the platform together in a really useful way. It is by far the best example of "Social Search" – the premise of creating a search engine based not on websites but on entities – people, places and things. The company has been quietly iterating it since last year. There's still a long way to go but the foundations are already there for what promises to be the only true rival to Google in the world of information organization and retrieval and only days ago did they start testing new functionality that allows some users to search through content as well as people, interests and things.