Facebook's Big Announcement
By: Julia Boorstin | CNBC Media and Entertainment Reporter
1:39 PM/ET: It totally makes sense that Yelp shares are dropping on this news-- now we're seeing how you can search for dentists your friends like.
1:41 PM/ET: Now Facebook's Tom Stocky is talking about how you can search TV shows your friends like. The opportunity to show ads for TV shows that your friends like seems obvious.
Search shows that the music liked by fans of Romney and fans of Obama is pretty totally different.
Now you can search for friends who speak different languages. Until now the best place to do that kind of search was LinkedIn.
Hmm.
1:34 PM/ET: Yes, Graph search will impact revenue.
How?
If Facebook can keep people ON Facebook when they're looking for things-- rather than going to Google-- that means more opportunities to show ads.
I don't see any ads featured in the results, but the potential to offer "featured results" or search ads is huge. And with anything Facebook does, its primary goal is to drive engagement, i.e. Use.
Here comes another reminder about privacy-- you can only search results that have been shared with you. So the tighter users privacy settings are, the fewer search results, and the less valuable this new tool is.
This is a great tool for personalized search, but the question of the limiting impact of privacy is an interesting one.
1:28 PM/ET: Now Facebook is showing how you can search people based on their career history-- is this a threat to LinkedIn?
Search within Facebook was pretty terrible until now, so the ability to search people based on professional background details is a big leap.
The ability to search photos is now being featured, the cool thing is that they're ranked by the popularity of the photos. You can also search based on where the photos are taken, who they're featuring, etc.
(Read More Coverage: Facebook Rolls Out Social Search Feature)
1:25 PM/ET: Zuck has left the stage, the developers have replaced him and are Demming the search.
The auto complete seems like a huge part of this demo. They're showing how you can search for "Friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter."
Results will be entirely unique to each user, and that all comes down to which information has been shared with you, and the results are sorted by how close you are to these individuals.
The big question I think is how the privacy piece will play out. The more private your friends are, the less stuff you'll be able to search.
Facebook search benefits from less privacy- if it pushes people in that direction it'll just frustrate people.
Now Facebook is demoing a search for single men in San Francisco. Facebook as a dating service-- it was only a matter of time.
