Facebook has a mind-blowing amount of useful information sitting on its servers — 500 terabytes of new data every day, at last count — but until now it lacked an efficient way for any one person to take advantage of it. So it created “Graph Search,” which will allow all of us to pillage our friends’ status updates, interests, photos and general Facebook activity.
The possibilities of Graph Search are sprawling and ambitious. As the company says, it wants to provide answers, not links to answers. If you want to know what music or TV shows certain friends are into (or vice versa), you’ll be able to find out (and so will they). If you’re trying to suss out a consensus on a potential dinner destination, the hive mind of Facebook could help you out. And if you’re uninterested in using OK Cupid for your online dating needs, you can stalk away on Facebook to find all your friends’ single friends (at your own peril).
But for all the vast possibilities of Graph Search, it boils down to something simple and profound: Facebook finally has a search technology that works.
Up until now, trying to search for anything that wasn’t a friend or business quickly became an exercise in futility. To say it’s dysfunctional would be a generous compliment. Graph Search is a direct solution to that problem.
And because of that, Facebook (FB) has just taken one big step closer to becoming what America Online used to be: an all-inclusive Internet experience. (Minus the dial-up service and monthly fee, of course.) It’s an isolated island of content walled off from the rest of the online realm.
The similarities between the two companies have been pointed out before, and a return to this model of the Internet isn’t quite as regressive as it may seem. Once upon a time, in an effort to make the chaos of the Web palatable to the uninitiated, AOL (AOL) offered up a singular Internet shard with a consistent look and feel.
Many more of us are now well-versed in the ways of the Internet, but the sheer volume of information available has become overwhelming. Social networks thrive, in many ways, as filters. You tell the network what and who you like, and it gives you the information you want.
The arrival of Graph Search doesn’t mean that Facebook instantly transformed into its own self-sustaining network, or that it will do so anytime soon. It merely put the first pieces in place for people to get everything they need out of the Internet without ever setting foot outside Facebook’s domain.
You can read this full article on CNN.com.
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