Facebook’s Graph Search

What do we need to know about Facebook’s new Graph Search. The new Facebook feature helps you find people, places and things and explore Facebook in a new way. You can find more of what you are looking for through your friends and connections. So far the search box we use was not very powerful. We could search for friends, Facebook pages, etc.

What Facebook’s Graph Search means:

• it’s a new search engine (searchable database)
• helps users to find content based on certain criteria – e.g. “tourist attractions in Spain visited by my friends” (for more check Mashable.com)
• Graph Search is available now in a very limited beta program in English (US) audiences. You need to sing up to find out when you can start using Graph Search.
• it will allow everyone to search easily across the network and their friends’ information.
• how privacy works with Graph Search? – check the Facebook Page – Graph Search for more details

What about the privacy issues?

• privacy issue #1: If your “likes” are public, those “likes” are Graph Searchable by all.
• Any of your content that could be discovered before Graph Search will be discoverable after Graph Search, and it will not cause any content to be revealed that wasn’t already accessible.
• privacy issue #2: others will be able to use Graph Search to find any content that you already share with them.
• like in the past in Facebook: any photo of you that someone else uploads will be searchable per that user’s privacy settings.
  e.g.: if a friend uploads a picture of you at a bar, geo-tags it and sets it as public, it will be Graph Searchable to anyone who searches for pictures from that bar. What you can do is: untag yourself or request the uploader of the photo remove it from Facebook or change the privacy settings.

Make sure to check your Facebook privacy settings:

• “who can see your stuff” – go to privacy settings and then choose privacy. Now you can see the option: who can see my stuff?

• timeline and tagging – go to privacy settings and make sure what you safe with others on Facebook



• your privacy choices determine what’s searchable – you can look up anything shared you on Facebook, and others can ind stuff you’ve shared with them, including content set to Public. It means – different people see different results.
• it’s time to review your Facebook privacy settings – to make sure how much of your information are going to be searchable. Check your data on Facebook to make sure you are NOT sharing anything publicly that you wish you were not.
• Privacy settings tips:
  1. set your default preferences to share with “friends only”
  2. check your “likes” and get rid of some of those “likes” you don’t want people to know about. Check the Gizmodo post on that issue
  3. check your photos. Make sure that photos that are tagged of you and untag the ones you don’t like or may be inappropriate.

What do you think about the idea of Facebook’s Graph Search? Are you looking forward to test this new feature?


Images credit: screenshots of Graph Search and Facebook profile from www.facebook.com