Facebook Amps Up Its Search & What That Means for You

Imagine this scenario: you need to choose a restaurant for an important event, like a date or birthday party. But, you’re new to the area and need recommendations.

Most of the time, you would go to Google with a search like, “restaurants nearby” or, for example, if you want to eat Italian, “Italian restaurants”.  But, you’re smart. You need real reviews from people in order to find the perfect place. So, you go to one of our traditional favorites, Yelp!.

There, you can get reviews and ratings for nearby Italians restaurants. But, that’s still missing an important piece of the search-puzzle: recommendations from people you know; people you can trust.

That’s the new ground “Facebook Graph Search” is breaking.

What’s Facebook Graph Search?

Until now, searching on Facebook has been a difficult task for fans. It only allowed searches for names of restaurants and businesses. But, recently Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team have announced updates to their search engine called “Facebook Graph Search”. It’s well known that as Facebook has grown, their search engine has struggled to provide relevant results.

Graph Search is a major investment in improving the ease and usefulness of searching for products and services on Facebook.

The sophisticated new search system will incorporate a major factor in decision making that Google and Bing haven’t yet utilized: interest-based results and friend-based recommendations.  People on Facebook will be able to search for businesses associated with ones their friends like as well as ones associated with pages they like.

“I had a toothache the other day and because I’m relatively new to the area, and looking up ‘Dentists that my friends like’ was awesome because I knew I could go to someone that knew what they were doing.” – Andrew

What this means for you

This gives you the opportunity to instantly access your friends’ favorite specifications. The results your Facebook friends have built, automatically creates a customized archive of recommendations from which to choose. The future of business searching online is based on what’s shared commonly, believed and of interest, which lends to the likelihood you’ll trust results more than ever before.

Businesses have a greater opportunity to reach friends of fans and potential fans whose interests connect with their friends.