I logged on today to see that I’ve now got the Facebook Graph search activated on my account, at first glance it’s quite “metro”, similar style to Windows 8 with coloured squares and icons, the actual blue strip menu at the top of the page has been redesigned, This looks smoother and the icons are slightly more subtle.

The actual drop down is quite large and changes on the fly as you type in different things, what you see above is there by default; I clicked “Restaurants nearby” and was greeted with a page of restaurants, a map of the restaurants and a series of drop down boxes where I could select if my friends had visited, if it was near to me and the type of restaurant it is. It actually works better than I thought it would and in practice has a use; This is an ideal way of using geo location to find specific businesses or restaurants in this case in and around your local area.

You can type different phrases into the search box, an example we tried was “people that live nearby”. And as I’d mentioned in a previous post this all feels a bit “datey”, you can narrow down your search by gender, relationship, age range, employer. If there was ever a time to make as much as you can private on Facebook, this is it!

The actual results weren’t really that great, out of the top 20 results only one lived within 40 miles of me, and it failed to mention the 50 odd friends that I have who all live in the local area (I don’t use Facebook hence the 50 friends, although in all honesty I have considerably less in the real world!).

To recap, I love the business search side of things and think this could really benefit local businesses, the extreme amount of detail you can put into searching for people can only encourage people to go trolling round Facebook harassing people they don’t know; Something people up to this point have regularly been banned from Facebook for.

The whole internet world waited on tenterhooks for Facebook’s big announcement at 6pm on the 15th January I can’t help but feel a little disappointed with their “graph search” that they have unveiled, I was expecting a search engine to rival Google and what we actually ended up with was a primitive dating site search engine, to quote a friend on facebook “I can now find friends of friends who are into calligraphy”.The fact of the matter is it’s a bit of a flop.

All looks very much like a early 2000′s dating website to me!

With Facebook’s connections with Bing I’d thought at some point in the near future there would be a more direct involvement with searching the world wide web; The current offering seems to flip the Facebook model on it’s head. I always presumed Facebook was built for people to connect with people that they knew, friends, families and colleagues…This however seems to push people towards meeting new people by searching based on your interests, relationship status and if you are a fan of Star Wars films.

It does seem to have some minor positives like searching for restaurants and other businesses that your friends and family have visited, I can’t help feel all this has been done to death by multiple applications across multiple platforms already over the last few years.

What are your thoughts on Facebook’s latest offerings?