Facebook Takes A Big Bite Out of Google, Foursquare And Yelp

January 15, Facebook announced  a new experience that it’s calling Facebook Graph Search, giving you the power to map out their relationships with the people and things they care about. from a whopping more than a billion people, more than 240 billion photos and more than a trillion connections.

Graph Search  allows people to use the graph to make new connections. Facebook Graph Search will only include people, photos, places and interests — posts and other interests (like song listens) are in the works. Although search results will be personalized, Facebook says that more generic queries should produce fairly common results for most people.

This is a social search engine, not a traditional search engine like Google or Bing is, but possibly will  just  take a big bite out of Google. It’s the Ex-Googler Dream Team That Built Facebook’s New Graph Search Tool.

Thanks to Graph Search, Facebook is about to be much, much better for finding places such as restaurants, cafes, bars and the like. Graph Search uniquely ranks the placement of places such as restaurants by using a special algorithm that incorporates things including distance, five-star ratings, likes, and check-ins from friends. So, at first look,  it could be very competitive with products like Yelp and Foursquare that have been the top dogs in the local search space for the past several years. And, its Graph Search Ads could be a goldmine for Facebook.