Facebook CEO/Darth Vader of the internet Mark Zuckerberg’s big announcement is a search engine that will revolutionise the way we stalk people. Graph Search, launched today but currently in beta, is a potentially game changing but worryingly powerful (read: stalker-enabling) internal search engine which lets us intuitively and efficiently access data already available on the biggest social network in the world using existing Facebook qualifiers such as age, interests and location.
“People use search engines to answer questions,” Zuckerberg explains in this adjoining Wired interview.
“But we can answer a set of questions that no one else can really
answer. All those other services are indexing primarily public
information, and stuff in Facebook isn’t out there in the world — it’s
stuff that people share. There’s no real way to cut through the contents
of what people are sharing, to fulfill big human needs about discovery,
to find people you wouldn’t otherwise be connected with. And we thought
we should do something about that. We’re the only service in the world
that can do that.”
Graph Search, in other words, enables you, me and everyone we know to search, locate and view the People, Photos, Places and Interests that live on Facebook. And we can do so with alarming efficiency. You might type in “My friends who like Flume” for example. Or “Friends of my friends who like Japanese Food”. Or “Single female friends of my friends who live in Sydney and like dubstep”. And therein lies the search engine’s most obvious function – crazy efficient profile stalking.
Let’s just stop and think about how much creepier the internet just got.
