INTRODUCING FACEBOOK GRAPH SEARCH

By: Danish Ahmedtwitter.com/danishctcfacebook.com/danishctcxpensieve.blogspot.comwww.mindfiresolutions.com

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Facebook’s New User Interface If you haven’t already got it, get ready for some radical changes Facebook is coming up with. Apart from graph search which has already made news, Facebook is also enhancing its user interface, in terms of both design as well as features. The new UI is apparently designed to reduce clutter and provide personalized feeds. With personalized feeds you can categorize and most likely prioritize how you receive updates of different groups or lists of friends. Now that may not sound much but these feeds are not only about your Facebook friends, people you follow and brands, personalized feeds would include more than people and brands, feeds can set up for social objects too. A photo feed would let you view only photos from your friends and pages, a music feed would bring to you music according to your preferences - music shared by your friends, tracks from your favorite artists ... Check out Facebook News Feed

From preview videos it seems Facebook is more than simply adapting to the radical web designing trend called responsive web design, simply speaking, web design done keeping in mind the fact that the web page is rendered correctly not only on desktop but also on mobile devices. In fact, the primary target for web designers now are mobile devices rather than desktops. However, the changes in UI also reflect the new functionalities Facebook is coming up with, especially, personalized feeds and a new way to search for information , which has been called Social Semantic Search Engine.

THE CO

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Social Semantic Search EngineMy Facebook account is yet to see any of the latest enhancements but one of my friend has been given the graph search feature which also includes some user interface changes. So while I have to wait for a while for the new user interface, I did get a sneak peek of graph search through my friend whose screenshots I have used in this presentation.

Graph search has been heralded as a semantic search engine because unlike traditional search engines, it does not take a keyword or string-based wildcard search mechanism in which algorithm matches characters and other factors to provide relevant results but is otherwise bereft of any meaning. Semantic search meant to search words and phrases based on their corresponding meaning.

However, Graph search is not the Semantic Web that Sir Tim Berners-Lee and W3C have been working towards. This Semantic search is based not on structured data but on social objects and activities that constitute the Social Graph or the structural foundation of Facebook ecosystem

Social Search Engine

Social search is based on the concept of retrieving information from the data generated users interacting with each other. A social object is any context on which more than one user act. It can be a web page , a picture, event and anything that connects users. Because the big data Facebook mines to derive meaning originates in users’ online interaction. However, on the web the scope of interaction is lesser and related to specific acts only , the collaborative data is called social object.

So currently , Graph search is available for a specific number of social objects only (for users, developers can make custom objects.)

Semantic Search Engine

SOCIAL G

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What Is Social Graph ?

The reason this is called graph search, is that the algorithm searches for 'within your social graph’. Social graph is a depiction of personal relations of users . A similar concept, interest graph visually depicts specific interests which link users together.

Social Graph

Social graph represents relationship between individuals, the context, whether object or gesture, forms part of the network but minor part.

Interest Graph

Interest graphs are graphical representation of things and activities (physical, digital, virtual) that form the commonality between a group of users. The basic difference is that unlike Social Graph, in Interest Graph, the context is represented as primary node.

FACEBOO

K SOCIAL G

RAPHHow Social Graph WorksFacebook combines the social graph as well as interest graph of users to access a treasure of user data.

which can help predict what would be the what the user would chose in a given situation. If you have any knowledge on contextual ads on web (Google’s major source of revenue) work, you would be aware of the benefits one can reap knowing a user’s preferences in such detail.

Facebook GraphFacebook graph attempts to proceed more on the lines of natural language paradigms and borrows the concept of “noun” and “verb” from grammar terminology to derive semantics. The entities (noun), both users and social objects are represented as nodes while the edge or the link connecting the two nodes represents the action or relationship.

Social Object

Social object is any context that forms the basis of interactions between two or more users. For instance a photo, video , link or just about anything that leads users to interact by their opinion about the object, is a social object. (Think about it , in physical world too, when you talk with some body, you talk about “something”)

John

Jane

Jane’s videoLike

In the following illustration John and Jane are users while the video is a social object. It is important here to note that both users and social objects have metadata assigned to them. For uses’ the personal details such as name, age, profession etc are metadata , for social objects, if not explicitly provided, the object’s defining attributes can be taken as its metadata.

SOCIAL O

BJECTFacebook Big Data

Coming back to Graph , this metadata can be useful when applied along with an action type , forming relationships between multiple users and social object.

At a very fundamental level, user’s metadata determines and validates identity while metadata of the social object helps identify interests.

On Facebook platform “like” is an action type associating John with the video shared by Jane, an association that can lead to finding a lot of John’s preferences. Graph search algorithm may or may not take them into account but here are few assumptions I can make based on this associations such as (i) John and Jane have something in common(ii) John may like other videos which are similar to this one.(iii) Friends of Jane who like this video have something in common with

John and so on … (Please remember these are some examples I have come up with, I am not aware how exactly Facebook interprets these relationships)

Of course a single object may not help that much but the fact is, by simply using Facebook every day we are creating connections like these, in hundreds.

John

Jane

Jane’s videoLike

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Facebook Ecosystem

• Tablet • Mobile•

Lapto

p• PC

Facebook is thus a collection of user identities and their corresponding interests accessible from different devices such as mobile as well as desktop computers

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APIOpen Graph APIHowever, Facebook’s ambition goes much beyond its own website only. Graph API was introduced to allow website owners use Facebook’s social objects on their own website thus allowing users to interact with content more meaningfully and at the same time enrich Facebook’s data set .

Objects & Actions

•Social objects are similar to what ‘nouns‘ are in grammar. •Actions are verbs such as “like”, “read” , “listen”

Diagram representing the web, each node represents a website, Open Graph icon indicates websites that have Open Graph API integrated and are thus a part of Facebook world

User

• User

Action

• Read

Object

• Book

INTRO

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SEARCHIntroducingFacebook user interface enhancement as well as social semantic search engine are neither rolled out fully nor do they seem to have been implemented completely. The information provided should help understand what kind of changes Facebook has in store. As I said in the beginning, my Facebook account doesn’t have Graph Search or User Interface enhancement yet but one of my friends has and I will just navigate through some of the interesting features and include screenshots.

Social Network

GRAPH

SEARCHLogging In

If you log in to Facebook the first time the Graph search feature has been enabled , you would find the interface slightly different. The search box and icon have been moved to the left side of the screen (and of course it offers a tour to introduce you to Graph search) .

You can search for people, places and things

Graph Search

Searching

There are three distinctive features that caught my attention-1. You can search by typing in sentences instead of keywords for e.g “my friends who live in India” 2. As you type the search query Facebook auto-suggests not synonyms but similar sentences.

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INTERFACE

The new interface lets you navigate across ,mini profiles, photos etc without leaving the page

Navigate within the category My friends

Fresh UI

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Search Suggestions

Clicking on “My Friends who live in India” will load a list of friends but unlike earlier, the picture and information are displayed more prominently because of the design changes.

3. Since each search category has its own multiple sub-categories, selecting a parent category places you on the parent category level and the sub-categories are made available.

What you are really doing is asking a very specific question and Facebook search aims to return you the most relevant answer(s) . This is what Semantic Search is about, the search engine seems to understand your question!Of course, the search would be conducted within Facebook’s dataset but then , with more than a billion users, there are a lot of answers to be obtained.

FRIEND

LISTSearch results for “friends who live in India”

This is not all. You can find more information by exploring the additional option given on the lower right column of the page (shown in the next image )

EXTEND

SEARCHExtend Search

More information, including photographs and information in general can be retrieved using options given in the right column.

GRAPH

SEARCH Since categorization has been done in hierarchical manner, Facebook lets you dig deeper progressively

narrowing down the search data and thus raising the probability of finding the search object with greater accuracy

Navigating Menu

My friends Friends of my friends

Friends of my friends who live in a particular city

Friends of my friends who are from particular city and live in another or same

REFINE SEARCH

Refine Search

Multiple social objects can be combined to narrow search criterion. The screen shot above demonstrates search including 2 Friendship objects.

Refining search by allowing users to search and find nearly everyone on Facebook traditional way. Anyone who has used chat tools such s ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and the like would be familiar with this search patterns . The only addition here is the social object “Friendship”.

REFINE SEARCH

Search ObjectsGraph search doesn’t just aim to make finding people as accurately as possible but also enables users to discover photos, places, music and activities through social search.

The screenshot above shows users who are friends of Anand Misra as well as friends of at least one more friend. It also displays other social objects such as photos, music, places etc that are similarly related.

REFINE SEARCH

Search Social ObjectsTo explore more we need to return to the main menu by clicking on the Facebook icon.

Then after clicking in search box, select “photos of my friends” from the drop down menu this time.

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Photos

Set of photos of friends

Photos of only those friends who live in Cuttack

(Subset)

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Photo SearchGraph search also allows you to search for photos using one or more social objects such as “friendship”, “place” etc. Facebook happens to be the largest repository of photos online and if you have a large network retrieving only sets of photos you’d be interested in would be difficult. With Graph search this is definitely going to be much easier and fun.

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Search Photos Of A FriendAs apparent from screen shot below, the only person auto-suggested was Lezlie Tripathy* It was surprising because the friend whose account this is, is not friends with Lezlie Tripathy, so I assume it is her popularity on social media, abundance of photos and sizeable number of mutual friends that ranks her higher on social graph.

* Lezlie is an Odia model, actress, poet, social worker on my Facebook friends list but haven’t really interacted much and of course don’t have any photograph; the search would return 0 result.

SEARCH PLACE

Place Search

Although Facebook Places did not turn out as expected, it still offers several search options.

SEARCH TAG

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PLACESSearch For Places Tagged By Friends

The places your friends have checked in before is listed as shown below

Further refining this search you can really find places of interest in vicinity

SEARCH PH

OTO

Place Search

You can even search for specific public places nearby, in this case, a restaurant.

SEARCH PH

OTO

Dig Deeper To Search for Accurate Information

Let’s dig deeper and search for cafes in the locality.

OTH

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BJRCTSOther Social Objects

Similarly, you can not only search for things like music, movies, TV shows, books , others can view your preference in each of these. In the new layout the left column of your profile now includes your preferences in each of these.

ABOU

TConcluding

That’s for now, once the features are rolled out fully I might upload an updated presentation but only if it turns out way different than it seems to be now.

About Me

Danish AhmedWorks at Mindfire Solutions

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ENDDisclaimer

Views and opinion expressed herein are my own and do not reflect that of my employer or any other person or entity. I have tried to take permission for most of the images used. However, if you find anything objectionable, do let me know, I will address the issue as soon as possible.