It appears that the Facebook search bar is about to get a whole lot more complex and all encompassing. Starting Monday, Facebook will begin rolling out its advances search feature, which it announced earlier this year, to its users in the United States.
Titled the "Graph Search," the tool will allow people to search the social networking site a lot easier. ABC News reports that searches like "Restaurants in New York City my friends like" or "photos of my friends before 1996" will now return details results from other people's Facebook pages.
Unfortunately it will take a few weeks before everyone on Facebook using the "U.S. English" setting will have access to the new search feature but the company has said that several hundreds of millions of people will get it this week.
The speed and accuracy of the new search is what defines these improvements. Now, when you begin typing a search it will begin suggesting more relevant potential searches. Now it can better understand what people are searching for and display details that re relevant to what he or she cares about.
Graph Search isn't Web search. We aren't duplicating what Bing does and what Google does, but rather we are making things easier for people to find on Facebook," Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said in an interview with AllThingsD.
With Facebook making user information more easily searchable, it raises a few privacy concerns, which are always a sticking point for Facebook and its users. While personal information is only available to those who you have shared it with, the new tool makes it all too easy for your information to resurface from those you've shared it with. As a result, along with the new search function, Facebook is going to be reminding people how to customize their privacy options. A small alert will pop up over the privacy tools area in the upper right hand side of the page once users get the new graph search pool.
