Facebook unveils social search feature

BARBARA ORTUTAY

AP Tech­nol­ogy Writer

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Face­book CEO Mark Zucker­berg unveiled a new search fea­ture that’s designed to entice peo­ple to spend more time on its web­site and will put the social net­work­ing com­pany more squarely in com­pe­ti­tion with Google and other rivals such as Yelp and LinkedIn.

Called “graph search,” the new ser­vice unveiled Tues­day lets users quickly sift through their social con­nec­tions for infor­ma­tion about peo­ple, inter­ests, pho­tos and places. It’ll help users who, for instance, want to scroll through all the pho­tos their friends have taken in Paris or search for the favorite TV shows of all their friends who hap­pen to be doctors.

Although Zucker­berg stressed that “graph search” is dif­fer­ent from an all-purpose search engine, the expanded fea­ture esca­lates an already fierce duel between Google Inc. and Face­book Inc. as they grap­ple for the atten­tion of Web surfers and rev­enue from online advertisers.

“This could be another rea­son not to use Google and another rea­son to stay on Face­book for longer peri­ods,” said Gart­ner ana­lyst Brian Blau. “I don’t think Google is going to lose its search busi­ness, but it could have an impact on Google by chang­ing the nature of search in the future.”

Facebook’s foray into search marks one of its bold­est steps since its ini­tial pub­lic offer­ing of stock flopped eight months ago amid con­cerns about the company’s abil­ity to pro­duce the same kind of robust earn­ings growth that Google deliv­ered after it went pub­lic in 2004.

Although Facebook’s stock has ral­lied in recent weeks, the shares remain below their IPO price of $38. Investors seemed let down by Tuesday’s news, caus­ing Facebook’s stock to slip 85 cents, or 2.7 per­cent, to close at $30.10.

If the new search tool works the way Face­book envi­sions, users should be able to find infor­ma­tion they want to see on their own instead of rely­ing on the social network’s for­mu­las to pick which posts and pic­tures to dis­play in their fees, ana­lysts said.

Until now, Face­book users were unable to search for friends who live in a cer­tain town or like a par­tic­u­lar movie. With the new fea­ture, peo­ple can search for friends who, say, live in Boston who also like “Zero Dark Thirty.” And Facebook’s users will be able to enter search terms the same way that they talk, rely­ing on nat­ural lan­guage instead of a few stilted key­words to tele­graph their meaning.

Only a frac­tion of Facebook’s more than 1 bil­lion users will have access to the new search tool begin­ning Tues­day because the com­pany plans to grad­u­ally roll it out dur­ing the next year to allow time for more fine tuning.

Not all the inter­ests that peo­ple share on Face­book will be imme­di­ately indexed in the search engine either, although the plan is to even­tu­ally unlock all the infor­ma­tion in the net­work while hon­or­ing each user’s pri­vacy settings.

That means users can only search for con­tent that have been granted per­mis­sion to see by their online con­nec­tions, Zucker­berg pledged.

“Every piece of con­tent has its own audi­ence,” Zucker­berg said.

Though the com­pany has focused on refin­ing its mobile prod­uct for much of last year, the search fea­ture will only be avail­able on Facebook’s web­site for now, and only in English.

Facebook’s deci­sion to start its foray into search slowly reflects the for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge that it’s try­ing to tackle. The “social graph,” as Face­book calls its trove of con­nec­tions between peo­ple and things, is “big and chang­ing,” Zucker­berg said. There are 240 bil­lion pho­tos on Face­book and 1 tril­lion connections.

Index­ing all this, he added, is a dif­fi­cult tech­ni­cal prob­lem the com­pany has been work­ing on.

Although Face­book isn’t try­ing to fetch infor­ma­tion across the Web like Google does, it’s clearly try­ing to divert traf­fic and ad spend­ing from its rival. Face­book is hop­ing to do this by mak­ing it eas­ier for its users to quickly find many of the things that are most impor­tant to them: movie, music and restau­rant rec­om­men­da­tions from friends and fam­ily; photo gal­leries of peo­ple they care about; and new con­nec­tions to old friends and other peo­ple with com­mon interests.

It’s the kind of per­sonal data that has been dif­fi­cult for Google to col­lect, partly because Face­book has walled off its social net­work from its rival’s search engine. Instead, Face­book has part­nered with Microsoft Corp. to use its Bing search engine to power tra­di­tional Web searches done through its site. That part­ner­ship remains.

“”For a cer­tain set of searches, this is going to be far more pow­er­ful than Google,” pre­dicted Ovum ana­lyst Jan Dawson.

Face­book doesn’t have plans to show addi­tional ads as peo­ple use the new search tool, but ana­lysts said that is bound to change. “If the appro­pri­ate pri­vacy pro­tec­tions are in place, this could be a sig­nif­i­cant boost in value that Face­book can pro­vide to its users and, in time, that will pro­vide some really valu­able new adver­tis­ing avenues for adver­tis­ers,” Daw­son said.

Google is try­ing to over­come its social net­work dis­ad­van­tage with Google Plus, a ser­vice that the com­pany launched 19 months ago in attempt to glean more insights into people’s rela­tion­ships and counter the threat posed by Facebook.

Helped by Google’s aggres­sive pro­mo­tion of the ser­vice, Plus boasts more than 135 mil­lion peo­ple who post infor­ma­tion and pho­tos on their pro­files. But Google Plus users still aren’t shar­ing as much or hang­ing out on its ser­vice as long as Face­book users do, rais­ing ques­tions about whether Google will ever be able to get a grasp on the Internet’s social sphere as firmly as Face­book does.

Face­book now must prove it can mas­ter the intri­ca­cies of search and pick­ing the right ads to show to the right peo­ple at the right time — com­pli­cated tasks that Google has honed dur­ing the past 14 years to estab­lish itself as the Internet’s most pow­er­ful com­pany. It cur­rently pro­duces 10 times more annual rev­enue than Face­book. Though nei­ther com­pany has released its 2012 finan­cial results, ana­lysts are pro­ject­ing $52 bil­lion in 2012 rev­enue for Google ver­sus about $5 bil­lion for Facebook.

The search tool is lay­ing the foun­da­tion for Face­book to close the gap, said Chris Win­field, co-founder and chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer for online ad agency Blue­Glass Interactive.

“They can just chip away incre­men­tally,” Win­field said. “The can start by just tak­ing away one in every 100 Google searches, then one in every 20, then one in every 10.”

In an opin­ion appar­ently shared by many investors, For­rester Research ana­lyst Nate Elliott doubts the search fea­ture will prove to be a boon to Face­book. He views it as lit­tle more of a way for Face­book users to find new friends online more quickly and make new con­nec­tions that ensure the social net­work remains relevant.

“It’s vitally impor­tant, but it’s also unsexy,” Elliott said. “If Face­book thinks peo­ple are going to start search­ing Face­book when they would have searched Google, then they I think they are going to wake up in a year and find they are sorely mistaken.”

Posted by AP News on Jan 15 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.