Facebook’s New Graph Search Launches Today — Here’s How It Works

Today, Facebook is finally launching its new Graph Search feature.

The new search tool uses your Facebook connections and interests to come up with relevant results for people, photos, places, and interests.

These are generally results for which a regular Web search would come up empty — like “places I visited in 2010” or “photos of my friends taken before 1980” or “restaurants my friends like.”

(In fact, Facebook struggled with naming its new search feature, fearing that anything with “search” in the name would make people think of a Web search engine like Google.)

We’ve been playing with Graph Search for the past few months and its easy to see why naming the product was so hard. This is not Google Web search—it’s something completely different.

The interface strongly guides users to doing these kinds of searches, responding with plain-English suggestions for questions.

Here’s what you can expect to experience with Graph Search starting today.

Thanks to Owen Thomas who contributed to this article.