Last week I posted an article “Anonymous searches a thing of the past?” looking at how Graph Search will be a huge part of helping Facebook monetize their search engine. As a brief follow up to that post today we’ll look at how creepy, addictive and useful Graph Search will become.
Firstly let’s look at the 'creepability' of Graph Search. Yes it is creepy, but Facebook and social media generally are a bit creepy. Unlike the real physical World certain social normalities do not apply. In the real world you would never walk up to a stranger and based purely on how they look ask “can I be your friend?” then moments later you’re looking through their entire photo collection and seeing what they looked like as a baby! Anyway the point I’m making here is that the search results whilst can be rather unnerving at times are only going off what users have posted themselves. Graph Search simply makes it quicker and easier to access this information that is already out there and has been placed there by the uses themselves.
Secondly Graph Search has a certain addictive nature to it. People always want to know more about their peers and this is such an effective way at gathering the information that will enable users to keep up to date with what is popular within their social circles. The results are so compelling that it becomes addictive very quickly.
Finally how useful is Graph Search? Well Facebook have stated that it is still very early and is being treated as a Beta project for the time being but already it appears as though it will prove very useful. Not just for people but nations as Nolan Feeney highlights in his article. In Nolan Feeney’s article Tom Scott searches for “Islamic men interested in men living in Tehran, Iran” which is useful information but for the wrong reasons to the wrong people. This brings me back to the first point about the results being rather creepy. Users will now have to really think about what they are posting, liking and sharing, and consider if that information could be used for negative means.
What Graph search will be brilliant for are marketers. Giving more context than Google will allow much more targeted advertising. Searching for “people who like web design” for example would enable marketers to identify trends within these groups, find out if there is a location where “people who like web design” is highly concentrated, if “people who like web design” also like other common factors and use this as leverage. Then you can take it a step further and find “people who like web design who also like e-commerce”. Such niche results will allow for an e-commerce/web design campaign to be laser targeted at those people who have “liked” e-commerce and web design. Adverts that will start to appear will become much more compelling and engaging.
Overall I think whilst it can be creepy, a little bit addictive and possibly used for the wrong reasons it will be nice for Google to experience some healthy competition after its decade of being relatively untouchable at the top of the search engine pile.
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