Searching for the value in Facebook Graph Search

I had written quite a long post on Facebook Graph Search and managed to accidentally delete it before saving. Frustrating, but in restrospect I realised my whole post boiled down to this summary:

1. It searches your social graph and their likes to get a (hopefully) more relevant set of results than Google's "Whole World Wide Web" link heirarchy does (good summary here on Search Engine land)

2. Despite the predictable hype*, there is less to it than meets the eye at the moment, as it relies on a limited data set, ie your social graph and their "like" activity objects that they have defined.

3. But that is a limited set, so to get more viable than being a cool tool on the search bar (ie to be useful to paying advertisers, not users), it has to:

- Increase the size of the social graph it polls for you - never mind your friends, it wants all your friends' acquaintances, all your local service providers, and anywhere you've ever been, recorded on your graph.
- Increase the amount of data that you record, that it it wants you to record, for advertising purposes. So none of Auntie Millies kids' photos - you need to record things advertisers like to know, ie what do you consume

When that happens, things like this will be serious issues

4. It has to do this because it is desperate to find a Pay-Per-Click-for-Intentions advertising game plan.

5. Many of its users may not want to do this, either open their graph to randoms they don't know or collect data that they don't want to.

Now to be sure, the Google method is showing its age, what with continual SEO activity subverting its link values, and popular culture ensuring that the most popular link is seldom best, most valuable or even correct (see Gresham's Law of Bad Information Driving out Good), and using likes instead of links is clever - but is this going to be any better?

Not really, or to be more accurate, not as yet.

To use the tired old use case that hucksters of new technology for the last 20 years always come up with, i.e. finding a great restaurant in a new town like, oh, say San Francisco, and to outperform Google (or just any old recommendation website), it has to go far farther than my own social graph (as only a few people on my own graph live there in SF), to pick up people who don't know me, but who do live in SF. It also has to have these people record the great restaurants they all like in SF, as well as tell FB lots about themselves so it can persuade me that a search via those people is more relevant than me doing a quick Google or TimeOut or Zagat or whatever. And that means opening up people's data to people they may not want to open up to, and also getting them to collect data they may not want/be arsed to do.

And that is a very big ask.....(In fact the relatively low takeup of Foursquare et al suggests few will willingly volunter lots of location data - cue breaking open the Smartphone location sensor data...)

(Update - I see Slate has said some roughly similar sceptical things)

(Update 2 - ditto over here)

*Not just the standard Tech Hype Pack, many IPO investors are desperate for a way to surface from being underwater too!