What is the best online people search company to use?

What impact will Facebook Graph Search have on the way people use and also for Facebook as a company?

• Answer:

  I think it we be the first significant step toward social search, clearly differentiated from the traditional Google search. Facebook took great pains to explain that Graph Search is a different animal than Google (search). I  think they did a good job there. Clearly, this is only the very first step. Why restrict queries only to people, places, photos and interests?  There are many more very interesting alternatives. The ranking seems to be very rudimentary and simplistic, like Altavista social search. Clearly much more can be done with social ranking. Facebook emphasized a lot the personalization aspect of Graph Search, which is great, but one has to be (very) careful because at Facebook scale, the computational complexity of even simple personalization schemes can get out of control very quickly. Regarding monetization, I think Facebook Graph Search will be move them closer to harvesting social intent i.e. commercial intent which is the main reason Google annual revenue is $50B and Facebook's is $5B. Harnessing social intent will  make thing truly interesting in the big (user numbers) leagues :)