Facebook Graph Search Finally Arrives

January 22, 2013

Graph search is finally here; the highly anticipated answer to Facebook’s abysmal user search experience. The announcement leaves users and experts alike wondering about the functionality, but on the surface, hey, you can now search Facebook. ComputerWorld offers a nice write-up in, “How Facebook Built Graph Search and What it Means to Social Media.”

After dealing with the user experience side of the coin, the discussion turns to the developer side:

“To create Graph Search, the engineers likely used some combination of open source tools that are available on the market, combined with internally-developed code written specifically for Facebook’s extremely unique use case, predicts Jeffrey Kelly, big data expert at The Wikibon Project. Tools like Apache Lucene Solr and Cassandra- used by Netflix to index its movie library in Amazon Web Service’s cloud. ‘FB doesn’t use straight off the shelf software and hardware,’ he says. ‘They can’t, they either customize open source technology or develops it in-house.’”

Open source continues to make headlines, and Facebook is of course a highly visible open source user. Apache Lucene supports a number of other highly successful products including an open source enterprise leader, LucidWorks. Enterprise search doesn’t always make the big flashy headlines, but it is an important lynchpin of successful, dependable business, and therefore a necessary investment.

Emily Rae Aldridge, January 22, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

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