Today CEO Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook revealed a new kind of search technology called Graph Search in limited beta. Its a new type of social search engine that allows users on the social network to find answers to their questions and discover content in a more consistent manner.
The new social tool will facilitate journalists to discover information more easily, expedite the time-consuming process of finding sources for the stories they cover.
“This new tool will also make it easier for journalists to discover potential sources and public photos around stories you’re reporting. It will also make it easier to learn about places and interests that are not only tied to friends but also public figures and pages. Because Graph Search is in early stages of development, the first version focuses on four main areas: people, photos, places and interests,” according to Journalist Program Manager Vadim Lavrusik.
It improves the reporting process by conducting richer searches to find an expert for any given assignment. In other words, if you a covering a story about about any given company for example simply type ‘people working in Boston or Florida’ or ‘people who work at ACME Inc in New York. This feature may not give direct access to the source, but be to contact employees within the same institution.
Journalists And News Sources Easier To Find On Facebook
For the benefit of any reporter, journalist, writer or blogger Graph Search will make finding credible news sources much easier as of today. Lavrusik’s detail announcement explains that one could simply type “journalists” to locate people or relevant pages that fall into this category.
As long as they have the “Follow” feature enable anyone will be able to view their public updates on the news feed.
Photos by Location or Topic
The days of data mining and endless searches for images come to an end. Facebook has over 240 billion photos, so this means greater accessibility to images. They will be filtered by location within a city or because of a landmark based on tags from users.
This is a phenomenal tool that will come in handy during news breaking events and do further research from images uploaded to make sense of the events being reported on the platform.
Using Interests To Discover Connections
Another great integration into this category is journalists will search people’s connections, discover their interests-based searches, etc. Examples provided from today’s update are the following:
- Books liked by journalists
- Movies liked by people who are film directors
- Books read by CEOs
- Pages liked by people who work at Facebook
Graph Search
The social search technology is in the initial stages. Development in the ‘first’ version will center around four areas: people, photos, places and interests.
Mark Zuckerberg Statement About Graph Search
“There are a few pillars of the Facebook ecosystem. One is Newsfeed, right? It’s you show up and you can just see all the stuff that’s important that’s happening recently with your friends. Another pillar has been Timeline: Each person can share whatever they want with whomever they want on Facebook, and your timeline is your place where you can curate everything you want to show up about you. Graph Search is going to be another pillar that’s like that.”
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