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What Impact Will Facebook’s New Graph Have on Search

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Published: January 22, 2013

According to comScore, Google is the market share leader in traditional search queries. With 66.7% of the market, Google is the uncontested leader.

However, Google’s leadership is being challenged by a formidable new search competitor who has something very valuable to offer to their users.

This most recent competitor in the search arena possesses a massive pool of social data that they can leverage to grow their business. In fact, this company has a repository of 240 billion photos, millions of users’ personal information, and over one billion regular users who spend many hours per week managing their personal content and making connections with others on their website. The users include individuals, businesses, government and other organizations who use this service daily to attract, educate and influence customers, supporters and constituents.

Of course, that new search competitor is our old friend Facebook.

The recent introduction of Facebook’s Graph Search now empowers their one billion plus users with a powerful new social search tool. The Facebook Graph Search application allows a user to request a precise query on the content that has been shared with them and have the answer delivered to them. So Graph Search can search for information such as “movies watched by lawyers” or “music liked by people who like Barack Obama” or even “Italian restaurants my friends like in New York.” No other search provider has this ability.

Facebook’s Graph Search elevates contextual search to a much higher level with the addition of social data. A users interest to ask questions that link other users social data together makes this a powerful search tool. Because the social data is exclusively held by Facebook, it gives them a huge competitive advantage in the search business.

Facebook Graph Search gives their business users another powerful tool to market their products and services. The social data of users who have “liked” a business becomes even more valuable with the ability to perform Graph Searches. The new search technology allows businesses to link user preferences, location and other information to their marketing campaigns. Friends of friends of a company can now be identified and connected to marketing efforts. Businesses will be using Graph Search to develop useful correlations that will give them a more comprehensive understanding of their customers backgrounds and preferences.

Facebook Graph Search will give users an excellent reason to stay connected to Facebook for their search requests rather than jumping to other search services.

So now there is traditional SEO and Facebook SEO. With the help of Graph Search and their vast arsenal of social information, Facebook is setting their sites on becoming a much larger player in the world of search.

It seems there is something for every Facebook user to “Like” with Graph Search.

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