If you haven't yet used Graph Search, Facebook in its announcement recapped some scenarios users can take advantage of:
- Find old friends or meet new people who share your interests: For example, "people from my hometown," or "friends of friends who live nearby and like playing tennis."
- Revisit your favorite photos or photos you missed: "Photos I like" or "photos of my family."
- Discover restaurants and places recommended by others like "hotels in Seattle visited by my friends" or "restaurants in New York liked by graduates of the Culinary Institute of America."
- Look for interesting activities to explore such as "movies my friends like" or "music liked by people who like the music that I like."
Facebook also said it's now starting to retire the "who can look up my timeline by name?" feature, as announced back in December 2012:
Everyone used to have a setting called "Who can look up my timeline by name," which controlled if someone could be found when other people typed their name into the Facebook search bar. The setting was very limited in scope, and didn't prevent people from finding others in many other ways across the site. Because of the limited nature of the setting, we removed it for people who weren't using it, and have built new, contextual tools, along with education about how to use them. In the coming weeks, we'll be retiring this setting for the small percentage of people who still have it.
The tool uses ‘intelligent’ interpretation to allow you to find friends by interest, for example Facebook suggests typing in text such as 'Friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter' when planning a film night.
Yet it could also be used in the future by advertisers and marketers to learn more about you and target users with more personalised adverts.
In recent months Facebook has been encouraging people to enter more information about themselves on their profiles, including work and education history, family information and so on.
Graph Search uses any of this information about you that you have shared publicly - plus any pages that you've liked - including relationship statuses, addresses, phone numbers and check-ins.
This includes data shared with friends and friends of friends.
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