A Radical New Way to Look at Facebook

In mid-January, standing in a grim room, flanked by a pair of projector screens with his hoodie zipped nearly all the way up to his neck, the Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg announced Graph Search, “a completely new way for people to get information on Facebook.” The graph in Graph Search is Facebook’s so-called social graph, the map of each connection between each user. At the time of the Graph Search announcement, Zuckerberg said that the social graph contained a billion people and over a trillion connections. Facebook considers Graph Search its “third pillar,” after News Feed and Timeline. The product has been in beta testing for the past six months, and today it is being broadly rolled out to U.S. English-language users.

At the moment, the way that most Facebook users glean information is through the News Feed, which bubbles up a combination of new and algorithm-favored posts from friends into a single stream, or by peering directly at someone’s Timeline for a more detailed look at his or her life. Users must scan these distinct feeds—a broad swath of their network, or a view of a particular person—to obtain information, whether it’s a photo or to check if somebody is in a relationship. Graph Search fundamentally alters the way that information comes to the surface; it turns every profile inside out, spilling its guts to tailored searches. A Graph Search might be something like “2007 photos of my college friends ” or “my work friends who like ‘Yeezus’ ” or “parents of my friends whose home town is in Pakistan” or “friends of my friends who are single, twenty-seven years old, live in New York, have been to Chicago, and like OkCupid.”

Facebook isn’t making new information public—the company has been very careful to assert that Graph Search respects all the privacy settings that users have put into place—but it radically alters the nature of that information’s availability. Just as Google redefined how we look at information on the Web, Graph Search may redefine the way we look at information on Facebook. And, other than making their profiles completely private, there is no way for users to opt out of having their information available to Graph Search.

The last time Facebook made this kind of change was in 2006, when it introduced the News Feed. It transported users’ data from their profiles onto a single, aggregated stream constantly flowing with new updates. At the time, users were outraged, though the News Feed has now become a defining component of the Facebook experience. But it is not 2006; over the past seven years, we have been encouraged to share so much information that the changes that come from Graph Search may seem subtle, or at least unworthy of genuine outrage.

Still, Facebook is proceeding cautiously, to avoid a user revolt. Just before Graph Search was announced, Facebook unveiled a new tool that quickly summarizes how public a Facebook activity or post is, and whether it will show up in a user’s Timeline or in Graph Search. Zuckerberg explained in January that Facebook is “going to put an encouragement on the homescreen of everyone’s account, so that way everyone has the chance to go look through these tools and see what people are going to be able to find about them in Graph Search.” The tool, accessed via a small padlock in the upper-right-hand corner of the site, is useful, but it probably won’t allay all of users’ privacy concerns. Facebook’s privacy settings remain fairly byzantine in their intricacy; for example, removing a post from a user’s Timeline doesn’t necessarily hide it from Graph Search—that’s a separate setting. More broadly, even as Facebook touts Graph Search as “privacy aware,” what the company really wants is for users to share as much as possible, as publicly as possible.

Graph Search will eventually index virtually all of the content on Facebook—every link that’s ever been posted, every status update, every piece of data that outside Web sites have shared with Facebook through its Open Graph program—but what users will get starting today is fairly limited in its scope, restricted to searches of photos, people, places, and interests. It doesn’t work on mobile yet, either. And it is ultimately limited by the kind of information that people share on Facebook. But it is already a powerful tool for excavating information that would otherwise go unnoticed, and for spotting previously undiscovered patterns. It gives you a surreal sense, in its way, of what it must be like to use one of the National Security Agency programs described by the Washington Post and the Guardian, efficiently querying a database to learn more about a target. And as Zuckerberg said in January, Graph Search is still in its early days.