Facebook continues to share technical details on how its recently introduced graph search feature works, with Sriram Sankar, who works on search quality and ranking for the social network, posting a detailed note on the topic on the Facebook Engineering page.
TweetDeck, the former third-party social network management application that was acquired by Twitter in May 2011, is waving goodbye to Facebook as of early May, as well as scrapping its applications for iOS, Android, and Adobe AIR.
Facebook continues to talk up its recently introduced graph search, yet only a fraction of its users — “hundreds of thousands” of its 1 billion-plus monthly active users — can access the feature, with countless others having been wait-listed since graph search debuted in beta last month.
Application developers on Facebook have not had a way to determine how many users of the social network discovered their apps via the search bar on Facebook.com, until now.
Five websites accounted for 20 percent of all search activity during the fourth quarter of 2012, and Facebook sat atop that list, as the subject of 8.48 percent of all searches during the period, according to the latest research from Experian Marketing Services.
Facebook’s new graph search feature was touched upon at several points during the social network’s fourth-quarter earnings call Wednesday, but specific details were scarce, as Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stressed that the product is still in beta.
After Facebook revoked access to its data from Russian search engine Yandex’s Wonder iOS application last week, Yandex announced that it will pull Wonder from Apple’s App Store and put the social discovery app on hold.
Thursday, Russian search engine Yandex released a mobile application, Wonder, that was something like Facebook’s graph search mixed with Siri. From an iPhone or iPod Touch, someone could ask Wonder, “What sushi restaurants do my friends like in San Francisco?” and it would come up with a list, based on their Facebook friends’ likes and check-ins. A few hours after the app went live, Facebook pulled its data from Wonder.
When it comes to social, the challenge for marketing departments in 2013 will be to monetize and measure their social investments by understanding the value of the data, insights, and conversions these social channels create. Marketers will now be asking the same of recently launched Facebook graph search as they look to use it effectively for their business.
Facebook’s newest addition — graph search — can change the way brands not only market on the site, but find potential customers through the social network, provided they’re savvy enough. Graph search takes the recommendation power of Yelp and combines it with Facebook’s tremendous social graph to make it more important for businesses to cater to their Facebook fans and brick-and-mortar customers.
