Facebook ramps up Google search fight

Facebook has moved directly into Google’s territory after launching an advanced search capability for the social network.

Mark Zuckerberg laid out on Tuesday a new vision of search based on his company’s private database of social information, rather than the collection of links on the open web that underpins Google’s service.

“We’re giving people the power and the tools to take any cut of the graph that they want and make any query they want,” Facebook’s chief executive said.

The competition between Facebook and Google has escalated in recent years, particularly in the fight for advertisers, as well as engineers.

Before today, Facebook’s minimal search features, which focused mainly on people, were considered poor. But marketers are likely to find the new features appealing. Combining search-based advertising with the social network data of Facebook could prove powerful for advertisers, analysts said.

“There are so many people on Facebook, you can get a really good signal really quickly,” Mr Zuckerberg said.

A 2012 global consumer survey by Greenlight, a digital marketing agency, concluded that Facebook could potentially capture close to a quarter of the search market if it were to launch its own search engine.

Mr Zuckerberg was careful to emphasise that the new search product was at its very earliest stages, and would be available to a very limited number of users at first.

He said he did not anticipate that users would use the new function for web searches, but if they wanted to, they could use Bing, the search engine developed by Microsoft.

The new feature gives Facebook users the ability to conduct targeted searches for people, photos, places, and interests within Facebook’s “social graph”, its database of social connections and affinities.

He demonstrated the new search box from his own Facebook page, showing how he could search for his friends who like fencing, restaurants his friends like, or photos of Priscilla Chan, his wife.

He used the latter search to choose a photo for his holiday greeting card, with the photos with the most Likes and Comments appearing at the top of the results.

We do not believe that Graph Search poses a threat to Google search revenue. We continue to believe that the depth and breadth of Google’s ability to crawl the web is unparalleled

Investors had mixed reactions to the announcement. Facebook’s stock dipped at the first word of the news, then rallied back above its opening price to $31.10, then fell again to a daily low of $29.91. It closed at $30.16.

Barclays suggested privacy fears would hold the new search facility back with Facebook struggling to dent Google’s main business in the short term. In a note, analysts at the bank said: “We do not believe that Graph Search poses a threat to Google search revenue. We continue to believe that the depth and breadth of Google’s ability to crawl the web is unparalleled, and the company has a significant competitive advantage in its ability to deliver highly relevant information to its users.”

Mr Zuckerberg was careful to say that the new feature was “privacy aware”, in anticipation of the fears that could arise from people now that their personal information is available in an easily searchable format. “We take this really seriously,” he said.

He highlighted new tools that allow users to see all their photos and personal details that will be included in search results, and other tools that allow them to “untag” photos in bulk.

However, in some circumstances, even images that have been untagged may still appear in search results for other people who appear in the photo, said Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer for policy. Facebook highlighted this possibility in its revision to its privacy policy last month.