Facebook unveils new way to take deep dive through friends’ data

Imagine you’re trying to find Mexican restaurants in Seattle that your vegetarian Facebook friends have liked in just the last two months. Sounds like trying to find a needle in a haystack, doesn’t it? Not necessarily. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled a new Facebook search engine he says will let you do just that.

Zuckerberg announced the launch of its new “graph search” at a press event in Menlo Park, Calif., Tuesday. He says unlike typical web search, it’ll focus on people, photos, places and interests.

Tech analyst Todd Bishop with Geekwire.com says it’s a badly needed offering that helps users dive deep and find detailed information that tends to get hidden on Facebook.

“It can be pretty hard to find the right kinds of information when you need it on their site and this is the kind of thing they really needed to do,” he says.

The searches can get as detailed as you want, Bishop says.

“You could search for people who are friends of friends who speak Mandarin Chinese, for example. Or if you’re looking for a date you could say ‘friends of friends in San Francisco,'” he says.

Zuckerberg tried to head off privacy concerns in his unveiling, announcing users will only be able to search for data they would otherwise be able to find on their own. Only your friends will be able to access your information unless you’ve made it public.

The graph search is in the early stages of development and is currently open to a select few as a limited beta release. But users can sign up for a waiting list to access the service as it expands.

The service is of particular importance to Microsoft. Any results Facebook can’t find will be passed on to the company’s Bing search engine, which could expose it to millions of potential new users.

“When you look at this level of detail, this is pretty remarkable what Facebook has done here,” Bishop says.