Facebook pushes search feature to more users

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

By BARBARA ORTUTAY

NEW YORK (AP) - Users who may have grown frustrated with Facebook's rudimentary search feature are getting an updated version designed to make it easier to find people, places and photos on the site.

Facebook unveiled its social search tool in January, but only made it available to a small fraction of its 1.1 billion users, as its engineers continued to tweak and test it. Over the next few weeks, starting on Monday, the company is rolling out the social search tool, called "Graph Search," to everyone whose language is set to U.S. English.

Unlike searches on Google, which are good for finding specific things like roasted kale recipes or Mizuno running shoes, Facebook's tool is most useful in unearthing information about your social circles. Graph Search lets you find friends who live in San Francisco who are vegan. Friends of friends who live near you and like hiking. Photos of your boyfriend taken before you met him in 2010. Nearby restaurants that your friends like - and so on.

But soon after Facebook launched the tool, the Internet had a field day with less innocuous and more embarrassing queries, showing just how much information people reveal about themselves on the site, intentionally or not. Care to find out which brand of condoms your friends prefer? Graph Search might tell you.

FULL story at link.


Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20130708/DA7DCS982.html

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Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg delivers her speech during Global Women Leadership Summit in Tokyo, Tuesday, July 2, 2013. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi)

[Orrex]

1. Hey, I heard she wasn't on the plane

[Skittles]

2. it is mind-boggling, the number of people who fall for this sh**

[alp227]

3. bottom line, if you don't want others to know it about you, DON'T POST IT! n/t

[TM99]

4. Yet one more damned reason

why I will NEVER ever be on Facebook.

This effectively bypasses any attempts to keep things private and secure by limiting access to specific people. Because you can not control those people and what they share which automatically connects you to their friends and their friends' friends. So one of those far out in the 'network' could do a search like the article describes and get your information by proxy.

No thank you. My presence on the web will be an old fashioned one apparently which is a static web site that I update and can therefore decide what I want to share and what I do not want to share.