Facebook rolled out its new Graph Search capabilities to users in the United States on Monday and, so far, it has failed to impress many who were excited about the feature's potential and feel it hasn't been lived up to.
Six months after the unveiling of the Graph search, its first time at people's fingertips showed signs of success but was overall pretty lackluster and, as CNET puts it, didn't go deep enough.
It appears the culprit is simply the limitations of the "Like" button and its inclusion as one of the primary attributes for evaluating people, places and things. The Graph search's appeal is it can discover shares and likes from your friends so you can all be on the same page about, say, a new movie or a restaurant. Unfortunately, the information displayed isn't necessarily indicative of friend's opinions.
For example, you can search for movies your friends like but you can't search for movies your friends rated on the site's star numbers rating system. Furthermore, it can't differentiate between your friend's chatter and activity about movies made decades ago and ones currently in theaters. As a result, everything dates back to a user's profile rather than their current activity. It tries to make up for this by factoring in "likes" but, as CNET points out, there are obvious limitations to that system.
Friend's can search for pizza places in the area their friends might enjoy but you can't get past the fact the place was "liked" and see more granular results. When searching for a restaurant liked by friends, all that is brought up is a list with average star rating recommendations from users who aren't necessarily your friends. That information doesn't come without a few extra clicks from a Facebook savvy user.
It is important to note the service is still in its early stages. Facebook plans to add Open Graph data from feeds and third-party apps to the Graph Search that will allow for much more varied search results and natural language questions from words like "watch," "listen" and "play." It appears the company is aware of the limitations of the "Like" button and is already taking steps to make the Graph Search the site's newest way to keep people connected.
