Tool Kit: Facebook’s Graph Search Makes Use of Friends and Likes

In January, Facebook began testing its new search tool, an enhanced version of the search box at the top of the site. The tool, which Facebook calls Graph Search, gets its name from “social graph,” a technical term for the giant network of connections among friends, friends of friends and so on. The social graph includes not just members’ names, but also the pages they have liked and the places where they have checked in.

Graph Search lets a user concoct short phrases, instead of stand-alone search keywords, to search Facebook; for example, “books my friends like.”

The tool does have limitations; if you’re looking for the nearest sushi restaurant in a big city, or trying to browse the complete works of the author Susan Orlean, searching Facebook is not the way to do it. In many cases, though, Graph Search lets you take advantage of the clicking and typing your Facebook friends, and their friends, have already done.

You can start a Facebook search by going to facebook.com/about/graphsearch in a desktop or laptop browser, and clicking the big button at the very bottom of the page to replace the search box at the top of Facebook with the enhanced Graph Search box. Facebook has not made the tool available on mobile apps yet, but says it will do so later this year.

Once the tool is installed, try typing a description of what you want into the search box, preferably using the term “friend” or “like.” Pages will pop up, as well as suggestions for searches based on what you have typed so far, using conversational language. This differs from the keyword-oriented style of Google, in which a user tries to think of words associated with what is being sought. Graph Search looks at Facebook’s organized data — names, likes, friends, locations, photo tags and so on — but not status updates or comments.

FIND A BOOK One of the most obvious graph searches is “books my friends like.” That will display the Facebook pages created for specific books on which friends of yours have clicked the Like button. Moreover, Facebook will show you which specific friends of yours liked each book, so you know who suggested which one.

You may have to scroll down a page or two to find a book you have not heard of before, or to dodge the collective bad taste of the social graph. (My own friends are too fond of books about social networking.) One way around this is to search for “books liked by people who like what I like.” This both broadens the search beyond your friends, and narrows it to those who have clicked Facebook’s Like button on the same pages as you.

Some authors, like Ms. Orlean, are also active Facebook users who click the Like button on book pages. That means you can search for “books liked by Susan Orlean” to see more than a dozen reading suggestions from the author of “The Orchid Thief.”

FIND A RESTAURANT Facebook cannot match Yelp’s extensive listings, reviews and block-by-block location targeting for finding a nearby restaurant. But while Yelp has a Facebook-like friend network, chances are you have not built up a network of your own there. Instead, you have built up a much larger network of Facebook friends, many of whom have been clicking the Like button on restaurant pages.

With Facebook search, you can look for “restaurants my friends like in Boston” or “nearby sushi restaurants my friends like.” As with books, Facebook will tell you which friends like which restaurant, so you know whose advice you are getting.

Keep in mind that Facebook’s idea of “nearby,” unlike that of a phone app, is not GPS-targeted. It can mean anywhere within city limits, even if it’s 45 minutes away. Facebook search works best for advance scouting of new restaurants worth traveling to, like “Japanese restaurants near New York, New York, liked by people who live in Japan,” or “restaurants in San Francisco, California, liked by people who like what I like.” In New York City, you can specify individual neighborhoods like “Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York.”

With Graph Search, Facebook Bets on More Sharing

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook’s greatest triumph has been to persuade a seventh of the world’s population to share their personal lives online.

Now the social network is taking on its archrival, Google, with a search tool to mine that personal information, just as people are growing more cautious about sharing on the Internet and even occasionally removing what they have already put up.

Whether Facebook’s more than one billion users will continue to divulge even more private details will determine whether so-called social search is the next step in how we navigate the online world. It will also determine whether Facebook has found a business model that will make it a lot of money.

“There’s a big potential upside for both Facebook and users, but getting people to change their behaviors in relation to what they share will not be easy,” said Andrew T. Stephen, who teaches marketing at the University of Pittsburgh and studies consumer behavior on online social networks.

This week, Facebook unveiled its search tool, which it calls graph search, a reference to the network of friends its users have created. The company’s algorithms will filter search results for each person, ranking the friends and brands that it thinks a user would trust the most. At first, it will mine users’ interests, photos, check-ins and “likes,” but later it will search through other information, including status updates.

“While the usefulness of graph search increases as people share more about their favorite restaurants, music and other interests, the product doesn’t hinge on this,” a Facebook spokesman, Jonathan Thaw, said.

Nevertheless, the company engineers who created the tool — former Google employees — say that the project will not reach its full potential if Facebook data is “sparse,” as they call it. But the company is confident people will share more data, be it the movies they watch, the dentists they trust or the meals that make their mouths water.

The things people declare on Facebook will be useful, when someone searches for those interests, Tom Stocky, one of the creators of Facebook search, said in an interview this week. Conversely, by liking more things, he said, people will become more useful in the eyes of their friends.

“You might be inclined to ‘like’ what you like so when your friends search, they’ll find it,” he said. “I probably would never have liked my dentist on Facebook before, but now I do because it’s a way of letting my friends know.”

Mr. Stocky offered these examples of how more information may be desirable: A single man may want to be discovered when a friend of a friend is searching for eligible bachelors in San Francisco or a restaurant that stays open late may want to be found by a night owl.

“People have shared all this great stuff on Facebook,” Mr. Stocky said. “It’s latent value. We wanted a way to unlock that.”

Independent studies suggest that Facebook users are becoming more careful about how much they reveal online, especially since educators and employers typically scour Facebook profiles.

A Northwestern University survey of 500 young adults in the summer of 2012 found that the majority avoided posting status updates because they were concerned about who would see them. The study also found that many had deleted or blocked contacts from seeing their profiles and nearly two-thirds had untagged themselves from a photo, post or check-in.

“These behavioral patterns seem to suggest that many young adults are less keen on sharing at least certain details about their lives rather than more,” said Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern, who led the yet unpublished study among men and women aged 21 and 22.

Also last year, the Pew Internet Center found that social network users, including those on Facebook, were more aggressively pruning their profiles — untagging photos, removing friends and deleting comments.