Facebook Unleashes Open Graph Search Engine, Declares War On Google | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Unleashes Open Graph Search Engine, Declares War On Google

allfacebook.com

62 pointspier051 comments

This is Bret Taylor, CTO of Facebook. I just wanted to clarify a couple of things because I think people are reading a bit too much into our actions.

First, Open Graph-enabled web pages have been appearing in search since the product launched in April. This is not new and not indicative of a change in strategy.

Likewise, only the pages your friends have liked appear in your personalized search results. While we plan on increasing the pages’ distribution through search in the future, right now, search is not the focus of the team working on product. We are focused on discovery and enabling users to build out their profile by liking things around the web.

So we aren't really declaring war on anyone. But it does make a compelling headline :)

Even with all the supposed deterioration of HN, comments like this keep me coming back for more. Thanks, Bret!

Hey Bret,

This is Nick. Compelling headline indeed. As I told someone else at Facebook today, unfortunately it's difficult to gain traction without a compelling headline. However the article doesn't specify a specific change in strategy just a continuation of the existing one.

As I posted this morning, declaring war may be a bit of an exaggeration, however most people have been unaware that content off Facebook shows up in search results and that pages can be optimized for such.

At f8 this was announced but not until recently did I begin seeing results that link off-site. The article was a way to illustrate how the Open Graph underlies Facebook's search strategy. Until you show the average user a picture of what that means, theoretical discussion only gets so far.

I hope it wasn't interpreted as a shift in strategy, but a photo is worth a thousand words and a headline can multiply that! You and I (as well as most people on this site) understood the implications of the Open Graph, but the average user had no idea what it meant.

The search results image makes things more apparent. Happy to adjust if you think this is excessive sensationalism ... this is definitely an ambitious search strategy no matter which way you cut it.

Best, Nick O'Neill (AllFacebook.com)

> unfortunately it's difficult to gain traction without a compelling headline.

The difficulties of the journalism industry don't excuse bad reporting.

Mongol warriors declare war on Panzer division. News at 11:00.

What's the terrain? Apparent technological supremacy isn't a guarantee of superior warring ability - recent history should have taught us this at least.

;0)>

Except Google won't be interested in nation building. :)

Hopefully they are not playing civilization then.

They might actually have a shot at winning.

I don't think this is very compelling. The example given (searching for a particular Marriott) works flawlessly in Google and I can get at much more information than Open Graph tagged sites will give me.

What problem is this solving?

What facebook is trying to build is not a search engine. Rather, I believe they're building more of a recommendation engine. As your friends (in theory) begin to "like" a bunch of stuff on the web, next time you do a search for hotels, the hotels your friends "liked" will show up.

The meta data for each site/artist, etc you like will also give them (in theory) enough data to recommend not just on what your friends like.

Whoever unlocks the magic in the data and offers a compelling, personalized experience will rule the next decade.

I think Facebook is vastly overestimating the number of people who are actually going to go out and "like" stuff.

The effort of Liking is easily an order of magnitude less than creating a link, which is what (nominally) Google uses.

And I'd SWAG that an order of magnitude more people are capable of Liking than are even able to create a new link.

The effort to implement a like button on a site is an order of magnitude more difficult than implementing a link.

Actually, it's not. Instead of an a tag, it's an iframe where the link is passed in as a parameter.

It took me approximately 90 seconds to implement from looking at the docs to deploy to one of my sites.

Technically 90 seconds is an order of magnitude more difficult than making a regular link. Not a huge hurdle, but I don't need to read any docs or go fetch embed code to make a link.

... I guess it's also because I'm using Rails, so I'm already generating links via a helper function. So I wrote another, one line helper that does the wrapping. So that initial 90 seconds is amortized over every new Like button I add, because I use like_url rather than link_to.

Also, often like buttons are used on something like stories, so you're only adding the code to one template, and now you have tons of like buttons all over.

I chose to go the other route which takes even longer. Load the XFBML version, and include the open graph meta tags.

I did the same thing that you did, wrapped it all in a like_url helper.

I don't know, man. The NHL, for example, has seen tons of engagement related to liking things. http://scobleizer.com/2010/04/22/facebook-ambition/

That and if my friends likes are valuable to me. Considering my having to ban Farmville and the like I'm pretty sure I don't want my social graph having anything to do with my search results.

Clicking on the link doesn't take you to a Facebook page -- it takes you to the TripAdvisor page, which is chock full of additional information. That page may also tell you if you have friends that have "liked" that property, which is not available via Google.

Full disclosure: I work at TripAdvisor and I led the Like project where we were a launch partner for Facebook.

I don't think that there's anything left that I can't talk about; I'm happy to answer question.

ps. And yeah, we're hiring to make this stuff more better.

Problem this solves; making search more relevant & personal....

Further whose advice and opinion holds more weight for you in regards to where to stay in Hawaii, best restaurant, etc? Your network of friends/family/contacts or a search engine? Who holds more influence over you for vacation spots, restaurants, experiences with businesses? Some examples I can think of now of how this is a better form of search. Though Google wins for me when needing directions, queries on pieces of history and the like; things your friends do not know but would tell you to search Google.

Overall i don't get the whole business mantra "What problem does this solve," when creating a start-up. SOme of the biggest sites on the web (Facebook or Twitter) were not solving any problem - rather they created new ways for us humans to communicate.

As far as I understand it, website owners have to opt out of being indexed by Google (via robots.txt), but they have to opt in to being indexed by Facebook (by adding the "Like" button). Or am I reading this wrong?

If website owners add the Open Graph Protocol <meta> tags in the <head> of their web pages, then Google (and every other search engine) can see that information as well.

That seems to be the idea. However, that's likely a strength for Facebook really. By creating a self-selecting index they're really removing a lot of cruft right up front.

IIRC Google tried something along these lines. You could (maybe still can?) sort of meta moderate search results letting Google know which ones you thought where 'best'. Same thing here, by liking a page you lend relevance to that page.

I believe OneRiot also does something like this. They have a widely installed toolbar that is out there collecting information about what users are looking at. It aggregates this information to figure out what is important at this particular moment. In other words, it determines relevance by attention. Facebook would be doing something similar here. The more attention (likes) a page receives, the more relevant it is.

I'm not sure if that actually delivers better results, or even meaningful ones at all. It's definitely an interesting move tho.

For that matter, Google knows probably as much as any entity can ever hope to know about people's browsing behaviors. They track what sites people click from their search results, they'll know if you go back immediately to search, or try a different search, if you're not happy with the results. They have Google Analytics installed on millions of domains and know intimately the behavior of users on those sites. I really fail to see how the simplicity of a binary "like" button on opt-in pages with easily-spammable RDF tags can compete with this.

All of the real cruft on the internet wants to be in every search engine it can. The real gems are entirely oblivious to where their traffic comes from / could come from.

The "what" is available to everyone. The "who" is what Facebook controls. Don't undervalue that.

I don't know about most people, but when I want to learn about the merits of a product or company, my first thought is to search for a variety of independent opinions of it, not the product/company's own marketing.

Thus, the last thing I would want to do is go to its Facebook page. I might want to go to its website first to understand what they themselves are trying to do in their own words, but Google can do that just fine, thank you. Thus, I don't really understand what niche they're trying to fill.

Facebook's search strategy reaches outside its walled garden and stretches out to the open web. So Facebook search results might include a few Facebook pages, but the majority of results will be web-pages that were more "liked" than others.

I think where it gets interesting is when you narrow the scope down to just what your friends "liked", or what men in the South Bay "liked," or people interested in football, engineering, art, or who are doctors, etc. You start to get into the long tail of search, which might open up some very interesting results.

That's what I do too. However, there are a lot of users who simply want to buy something. There are also a lot of users who are on Facebook all the time. It almost IS the internet to them.

Why does this feel like the second coming of AOL?

I think this is just about the advertising dollars. Facebook is quickly learning that on-page advertising conversion rates (and thus ad rates) are much lower than search. So they want a piece of that action.

The other thing they really need to do is become the default search engine on some popular browsers. Obviously Chrome is out and probably Firefox, but there's no reason they couldn't become one of the options on IE 9.

At school we had business case on the facebook platform yesterday. It said googles main worry was facebook data being used to make a search engine. And it makes sense - data about me and my network is a huge heuristic in ranking pages. Also, the lecturer said sites increasingly saw more referrals coming from facebook and twitter than google. That was news to me.

I can imagine this being incredibly effective, Facebook have discovered an effective method for human powered search that covers the whole internet (EDIT: was referring to the like button here).

Not only that, search results could be tailored to your age category, interests, what other people like you "liked". Put simply, this is genius.

EDIT: why am I being downvoted so much? Just my opinion.

What do you mean by "discovered an effective method for human powered search that covers the whole internet?"

Their indexing seems rather easy to game. From what I understand you have to include some FB specific metadata tags to tell FB to index it and what's on the page. What's stopping someone from putting metadata tags to say it's a page for a hotel somewhere or a movie, when they are really selling Viagra?

Isn't it because the "pagerank" of your page increases by how many people "like" your page instead of how many other sites link to your page. This really is quite interesting because it's easier to press Like than it is to write an intelligent post with a lot of words that links to the site that you like. The downside seems that every site has to buy in and put the like button on their site, but it looks like it's already too late and there's not much choice.

It's still easy to game, because there's no "dislike" button. Show 50% of your visitors a really valuable awesome page, and the other 50% the viagra spam. You'll get a ton of "likes" from the awesome page, and hence a lot of traffic for the spam.

Furthermore, with fake accounts, it becomes even easier to game facebook pagerank.

Unless they implement trust. "Your friends [in this friend list] like these pages today."

Allowing only trusted search results would greatly reduce the number of links returned. For most searches no results at all would be returned.

When you click through to the page, you'll see if any of your friends liked it.

You're assuming that Facebook's ranking algorithm is incredibly naive and is only counting the raw number of likes.

What if you add in whether you're friends with anyone who liked it. Or at least a few degrees away.

Facebook already finds and deletes fake accounts. Trust me -- I've had my test accts blown away regularly!

All good points, but in all of your scenarios having fake/stolen accounts would still allow you to game the system. Friend networks can be staged/stolen just as easily as an account.

Sure, but couldn't all the spammers band together and "like" each other's pages? Or set up a bunch of dummy accounts to like their own pages.

Plus I'm not too sure about the types of pages that will get liked and indexed. I haven't logged into Facebook in a ages, but I don't remember people liking or sharing links for things that I would ever use a search engine to find. But that could just be me.

Presumably you can already buy "likes" from someone who has amassed a large number of FB accounts? If not then it won't be long at all.

Carrying that one step further: why buy "likes" from someone if you can steal them? Maybe the headline should be:

Facebook Offers New Incentive for Identity Theft

I was assuming they're going to be including data from the like button.

EDIT: > What's stopping someone from putting metadata tags to say it's a page for a hotel somewhere or a movie, when they are really selling Viagra?

Facebook isn't going to blindly put things into its index because someone tagged a page. I also doubt search results are just gonna be everything tagged with that page but based on how many likes they page has, how simliar those people are to you. In my opinion, Facebook has the potential here to make this into the first innovation in search since Google.

I have a low priority work task to keep curent with FB's Open Graph (but mostly hacking Freebase). There is something to "like links" instead of URLs, but we will see how this plays out.

One thing that may be in FB's favor: even less than good ideas and algorithms can win big if you have enough data.

The problem with the results you would get back on Facebook search is that they are far less monetizable than the resume you would get on, say, Amazon. Google is at least halfway in between the two.

It would be nice to see a search engine with some social intelligence, because Google is too easy to game, and has been giving poor results of late.

If Google is too easy to game, you'd be doing it and not telling a soul until the well was dry. In reality you see some people having success and automatically assume it's easy. It is easy to game Google (a little), but not at all if you want to make legitimate money.

You have no way of knowing whether I'm gaming Google or not.

But anyway, what I'm referring to is the amount of spammy content that comes up when you do a Google search, while truly useful content doesn't do so well. Honestly, have you ever read a good article on About.com? Yet they rank very well on Google.

Search could still be much better. While Google is great, they don't understand people well enough to make the necessary improvements.

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