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Facebook to roll out Graph search tool

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Sharath Kumar
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NEW YORK, US: Social networking giant Facebook is rolling out new "Graph search" feature make it easier to find people, places and photos on the site.

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The updated version, first unveiled in January and made it available to a small fraction of its 1.1 billion users, will be e company is roll out new social search tool to everyone whose language is set to US English.

Expanding Graph search beta

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Graph Search results are personalized and unique for everyone, based on what has been shared with them. For example, if you search for "Photos of San Francisco," you'll see photos your friends took there and shared with you, as well as Public photos. This means if someone else does the same search, they're going to see different results because they have different friends, and different photos have been shared with them.

Controlling what appears in Graph Search

As Graph Search rolls out more widely, everyone on Facebook will see a notice on their home page with a reminder about how to control what they share and with whom. This follows a similar notice in December that highlighted new privacy tools to help people manage what they share on Facebook.

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AP reprots that 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.

To avoid any unpleasantness, Facebook plans to notify users that it's "getting easier for people to find photos and other things you've shared with them" along with a reminder that they can check "who can see my stuff" under their privacy settings.

"The goal is to avoid bad surprises," said Nicky Jackson Colaco, privacy and safety manager at Facebook. But she stressed Facebook's view that the search tool "indexes information differently than we have ever been able to do before, in a really positive way."

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