Facebook announces Graph Search for a more personalized search experience!

Facebook today announced Graph Search, a new way to search for people, places, photos and other things on Facebook.

Rather than indexing the web, Facebook has focused on making it easier to navigate and discover content within the social network. And instead of using keywords, users will combine phrases, such as “photos of me in 2006,” “my friends in San Francisco who like The Lord of the Rings” or “restaurants in New York liked by people who like Top Chef.” Search results will change dynamically as users type. Results are personalized to each user based on their friends, location, Likes and other connections. Users can further refine their query with filters to the right of the results.

Facebook emphasized that Graph Search respects the privacy of each piece of content, so that users never see photos or other information they don’t have permission to see. For example, if a user in New York has hidden their current location from non-friends, they would not appear in a search for “people who live in New York.” On the other hand, if a user makes their current city and photos public, they might appear in a stranger’s search for “photos of people who live in New York.” Facebook says it will begin prompting users to “please take some time to review who can see your stuff.” Users can finely tune their privacy settings from their activity log, which the social networkrecently updated to be more intuitive and give users more control over what they share.

Graph Search is rolling out in limited beta today. For now it is only available in English and exists on only on desktop. Graph Search has indexed people, places, photos and interests, but Facebook says it is working to add posts and Open Graph actions.

“It’s going to take years to really map everything that’s out there,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a launch event at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.  ”There’s more content that we don’t have than we have.”

For those queries that aren’t answerable by Graph Search, Facebook continues to partner with Bing to offer web search directly from the main search bar. Examples, Zuckerberg suggested are “Rihanna’s latest album” or “Menlo Park weather.” These facts aren’t yet available through Graph Search, so results from Bing will display instead.

Facebook urges employees to switch to Android!

Facebook is pushing Android, and pushing it hard. The campaign stemmed from an initiative earlier this summer to entice, and sometimes force employees to use the Facebook app on Android in order to make improvements to the Android Facebook app.

We know there is no shortage of strong opinions about iOS vs. Android. Regardless of those arguments, the Facebook app for iOS is outstanding, and by just about any measure a superior execution compared to its Android cousin (and other platforms). Facebook knows this, and it is part of the reason why the iPhone has so much traction with its employees.

Facebook has enhanced its campaign to get employees to make the switch to Android by posting propaganda posters around its Menlo Park, California campus. It calls on employees to ‘droidfood (Andrdoid and dogfood), which means to get employees to use Facebook on Android, test it, live it, and eat it (testing your own programs, hence eating your own dog food).

The push to make a switch will take some time to make a dent, given carrier contracts and the company’s own propensity to offer iPhones in the past. So for now, Facebook is still heavy on the iOS side, and officially the company is not recommending one or the other, but the campaign is taking hold. The whole goal is to get employees testing the next generation Android apps and bring parity with its iOS counterpart.

One of the new features to help evaluate apps that are in beta testing is called “Rage Shake.” It allows employees to just shake the device, it logs the current disposition of the app and device and it sends it to the mobile app developers. Facebook has about 4,000 employee testers, so that test feature streamlines the flow of information coming in which, in turn, will mean big improvements to the Facebook app for Android down the road.