Today, was Facebook’s big announcement. And no they didn’t announce a Facebook phone. Thank God. But they did announce something new, that well is something that is kind of borrowed from Google+. Facebook announced what they are calling Graph Search. It’s basically their own search engine with a ton of hooks a.k.a. filters. As you can see in the image below, you can refine the search by gender, relationship, employer, current city, hometown, school, friendship, likes and more.
Facebook is also redoing their top bar. The entire top bar is a search bar along with your friend requests, messages, notifications, profile link, privacy settings, and pages on the right-hand side. It looks a lot like another social network that many claim is a “ghost town. Check out the two images below, and see how similar they both look. Now mind you, Google+ hasn’t changed their website’s look in quite a while.
Looks a lot like the top bar at Google+ right?
Facebook is saying that Graph Search is different from Web search. With Graph Search you can search something like “my friends in New York who like Jay-Z”. Instead of relying on keywords which is what Web Search uses. Facebook also partnered with Bing for this new service, not a huge surprise there, right?
Now who’s ready to listen to all those people that are going to complain about these changes? It happens every time Facebook changes something or adds a new feature. You’re going to find a bunch of new groups about trying to get Facebook’s old layout back. But they never work. So perhaps instead of complaining about Facebook’s changes, why don’t you stop using the site and switch to something better, like Google+.
I know there are going to be a ton of you who are going to disagree with me, but Google+ is probably the best social network out there right now. And we get the most of our interaction and traffic from Google+ when compared to Facebook and Twitter. So the ghost town is pretty popular?
I’m sure you’re wondering, how does this tie into Android? Well if Facebook can’t even put out a stable Android app, how can they create their own Graph Search Engine? Looks like it’s going to be super buggy, not to mention it’ll take months to get it rolled out to all of their users. I expect to see it on my Facebook account sometime in 2014, if I don’t delete it before then.
So who’s genuinely excited about this new Graph Search feature from Facebook? I think it’s their way of saying “our search is better”. They’ve already “borrowed” many features from Google+. Including how pictures are displayed, the auto-upload of pictures, and a few more things. So if Google+ is such a ghost town, why is Facebook “borrowing” all these features from them? Let us know in the comments below which social network you prefer.