Tuesday, November 5, 2013
It’s been a big week at Facebook. Hashtags rolled out to most users causing quite a stir in the marketing world. (It’s yet to be seen how much utility they actually bring to the everyday user.)
And, Graph Search finally got turned on for my account. Graph Search is the long-awaited jump by Facebook into the world of search engines powered by Microsoft’s Bing. The official announcement came several months ago but roll out has been slow.
The first thing I noted was that I had to relearn a bit of navigation as things aren’t where they were and don’t always do what they did. That’s a minor annoyance and not really what this post is about.
In playing around with Graph Search I noted some very useful internal search tricks that should pay off nicely for local businesses. All of a sudden there’s a Yelp like search function for nearby places that, say, my friends like. Obviously this has some utility. Here’s a Lifehacker article on some nice, clever uses for Graph Search
But, one thing that I did not fully appreciate, even though it was part of the story months ago, was the integration of Bing Web Search results.
Let’s say I type a search that’s not one of the obvious Graph Search categories, something random like, in the case of the image below – small business marketing system. The first option is to show web results from Bing.
As you can see from the image, these search results display right in the Facebook interface along with Bing Ads.
