Facebook added a new dimension to its site Monday, launching a search tool called Graph Search.
If you’re looking to find a restaurant in Washington D.C. that your friends recommend, or a friend who shares your love for Taylor Swift to accompany you to her upcoming concert, you can now use Facebook to look up a wide variety of information about your connections based on their likes and interests.
It will be a few weeks before everyone who uses Facebook with the “US English” setting will have the new feature, but several hundreds of millions of people will get it this week, the company told ABC News.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the difference between web search and Graph Search: “Web search is designed to take any open-ended query and give you links that might have answers. Graph search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, rather than links that might provide an answer.”
To ensure the privacy of information users post on Facebook, Graph Search only displays information to people you originally shared it with.
If a photo is set to “Friends,” then friends will see it in their search results, and if it is set as “Public,” it could appear in anyone’s search.
Because of this, Graph Search results are unique to each person, just as each users news feed displays different information.
The tool will only work for the web version of Facebook for now, but the company plans to move the program to mobile apps in the near future.