The biggest
news in consumer technology this week was created by Facebook. The social
network’s new product – “Graph Search” – was the subject of an international
press event where analysts initially speculated on all new things, from a
Facebook partnership on the scale of Spotify or even their own phone. There
were a lot of posts about Graph Search. Facebook is an important, powerful
company, and that level of coverage is warranted. I’ve finally read through
most of the analysis that made its through my Twitter feed, and found myself
surprised by the range of opinions shared on the matter.
Graph Search
is probably not a “Google Killer,” as it indexes, restructures, and surfaces
data within its own walled gardens (which includes data pumped into Open
Graph). Facebook’s search product opens up a new window to search what many
refer to as the “dark web,” a web that is not accessible to Google’s
crawlers and algorithms.
Smart writers
weighed in with great insights. John Battelle, who has covered Google and
search for years, argues Graph Search gives Facebook a new layer of
interaction to increase engagement; Steve Cheney artfully argued Facebook’s mining of “Likes” created
distorted signals to begin with and puts Graph Search at risk of irrelevance;
Pando’s Hamish McKenzie cast Facebook as a network of connections over a
network of people, which presumes Facebook must continue to acquire user data,
either directly through native activity on the site or indirectly through Open
Graph permissions or acquisitions like Instagram; and Xconomy’s Wade Roush views Graph Search as Step One of Many in Facebook’s
attempt to produce more relevant results for everything, based on the belief
social filters and recommendations are going to best what algorithms can
deliver.
I haven’t paid
as close attention to Facebook as others, but my initial reaction to the
unveiling of Graph Search was that it was less about what individual consumers
could do (though that’s cool), and more about how companies, brands, and other institutions
could further segment the Facebook audience in order to hyper-target their
messages, advertisements, and attention. This is where Open Graph, in theory,
could continue to funnel data into Facebook’s data centers and, over time,
build all sorts of audiences with a few keyword search terms.
Where this
logic breaks down for me, however, is that I rarely send data to Facebook. I
use the service daily, and I like it a lot. But, I don’t connect many other
services to it that send data back to Facebook. I also don’t go to Facebook to
search, so it’s not an underlying behavior for me on their properties. This
creates two issues: (1) I’m not trained to search on Facebook; and (2) I’m not
giving Facebook more details about me or my graph in order to produce more
relevant results against a search. I know it’s dangerous to extrapolate from
just my own behavior, but I also sense people are growing more and more
reluctant to sign into new services with their Facebook permissions, or to
embed their Facebook account into Apple’s iOS operating system.
All this said,
I wouldn’t bet against Facebook. I don’t know exactly how, but I feel they’ll
figure it out and continue to extract key data, whether directly or through
other means, perhaps even acquisitions as its revenue streams mature.
Yet, reading
all these great analyses and reflecting on this week’s news, I find myself
thinking about other great sources for information where the underlying
behaviors for search are already being served in more natural ways. On
Pinterest, users discover new things through streams of images, but users also
can search directly for things they’re interested in, bypassing Google
entirely. On Quora, most visitors to the site lurk (e.g. “browse” and “search”)
and do not actively participate, many of them ironically ending up on the site
after entering a Google search.
It remains to
be seen whether Facebook is able to reinvent search altogether, or whether
Facebook successfully opens an entirely new search channel which could monetize
as well as Google’s, or whether other sites like Pinterest and Quora, for
instance, already have a head start on capturing the underlying behaviors
embedded into their properties and flipping them into a search business model.
What I’ve
learned from this week, then, is that Facebook and newer companies have a great
opportunity to allow their users to search within their walled-gardens and Wall
Street, already primed on Google’s model, loves how online search monetizes.
There will likely be many different types of search, especially as the “dark
web” continues to grow outside the sight of Google. Graph Search is an
important step in this direction, but given the competition and the pace of
growth of particular startups in the market right now, it remains to be seen if
Facebook will actually create the next killer search product. In theory, Graph
Search makes a ton of sense; in practice, however, Graph Search most likely has
a very, very, very long way to go. [TechCrunch]
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