Facebook Will Begin Making Graph Search Public On Monday

Use Facebook in American English and aren’t one of Graph Search’s beta users already? Then you can expect to get the tool in a rollout that will begin on Monday and take place over the next few weeks.

The company told ABC News that “several hundreds of millions of people” will get access to Graph Search this week, after six months of user testing.

Graph Search’s beta version launched in January. At that time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the product as completely different from Web search: “Web search is designed to take any open-ended query and give you links that might have answers. Graph Search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, rather than links that might provide an answer,” he said.

Examples of searches Facebook gave during its launch event included “friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter” and “photos of my friends taken at National Park,” but Graph Search’s beta users have discovered much more humorous (and arguably useful) ways to take advantage of the tool. Tumblr Actual Facebook Graph Searches gives many examples of these queries, including “married people who like prostitutes” and “employers of people who like racism.”

While funny, Actual Facebook Graph Searches touches on privacy concerns surrounding the product, which will no doubt increase as the product becomes available to a much wider number of users. Graph Search means that Facebook users have easier access to older content and makes paying attention to privacy settings much more important if you don’t want embarrassing photos from years ago dredged up or your public contact information scraped.

Graph Search is an important tool for Facebook as it prepares to sell demand-fulfillment ads, but the company has taken a conservative approach to monetization and is yet to announce Graph Search’s mobile rollout (it is currently available only on the Web site). But Graph Search is just one facet of Facebook’s quest to better organize the data generated from its 1.11 billion users (and even people who have never signed up for the site) have pumped into the social networking site and its properties. For example, recent patents reveal that Facebook has been working hard to make video content (including Instagram videos) more easy to tag and search.