The Monetization of Likes
With the Graph Search service, Facebook makes it possible to search based on sentiment. Suddenly, all the likes that its users have made in recent years become valuable. The service offers people the opportunity to ask questions that other search engines cannot answer. Or as Zuckerberg himself puts it:
“People use search engines to answer questions. But we can answer a set of questions that no one else list to data can really answer. […] There's no real way to cut through the contents of what people are sharing, to fulfill big human needs about discovery, to find people you wouldn't otherwise be connected with. And we thought we should do something about that. We're the only service in the world that can do that.”
Likes
A whole new database of human intent is being unlocked thanks to Facebook's Graph Search. It's no wonder that companies like Google , Amazon , TripAdvisor , Yelp and LinkedIn are keeping a close eye on this new product. According to one of Graph Search's product managers, Tom Stocky, the user experience on Facebook is still very passive . Thanks to the new service, this is about to change:
“Graph Search is a way to ask a specific question, to express an intent in some way. And of course an advertiser would want to target that intent. That's what search ads are for.”
Facebook is emphatically entering the territory of the above websites with Graph Search. Every search for a good restaurant, a nice museum, a book, a holiday or a job results in one page view less and automatically means less advertising revenue.