MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook Inc. has begun rolling out a new search feature that will eventually let 1 billion-plus users around the world unearth and sift through vast amounts of information that they and their friends have shared on the social network.
The new tool, dubbed Graph Search, takes aim at major rivals such as Google Inc. and promises to open up a whole new way of searching online. With the tool, users can find a single guy in San Francisco to date, a friend of a friend who knows of a job or friends who live in a 10-mile radius and are fans of "Game of Thrones."
"It's going to cause people to do all kinds of searches they have never done before because you couldn't do these searches before," said Danny Sullivan, founding editor of SearchEngineLand.com.
But the feature — Facebook's first major product launch since its rocky initial public stock offering in May — is already raising privacy concerns. It also did not immediately allay deep anxiety among investors over Facebook's moneymaking prospects.
Still, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg called it "one of the coolest things we've done in a while."
"Graph Search is a completely new way for people to get information on Facebook," Zuckerberg said.
For now, Facebook plans to roll it out slowly and said it could take more than a year for the search tool to reach all of its users around the globe. It plans to tweak the service to match how people use it.
If it proves popular, Facebook users may begin to spend more time on Facebook and less time elsewhere.
And that potentially threatens competitors — not just Internet search giant Google, which can't index the personal information on Facebook, but also other major players in Silicon Valley such as professional networking service LinkedIn Corp. and business review service Yelp Inc.
They aren't the only ones who may feel uneasy — at least at first. Facebook users will probably be wary of the new feature too. All of a sudden, Facebook pals will be able to easily uncover heaps of personal details about the user that already existed on Facebook but weren't quite so visible.
During an hourlong news conference at the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, Zuckerberg took pains to emphasize that the search feature was designed to give users control over the information people can search.
"We take this really seriously," he said.
Facebook is introducing the feature very slowly rather than flipping the switch overnight the way it did with News Feed to calm those fears, said Woodrow Hartzog, assistant law professor at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. Graph Search will be available at first to only hundreds, or possibly thousands, of users, with more being gradually added over the coming weeks and months.
Hartzog said he expects Facebook users will eventually find the feature to be useful but would first have to overcome qualms over "a loss of obscurity."
"People who interact socially online respond much better when they have a little time to remove or make more obscure information that is going to become more obvious with a particular technology," Hartzog said.
But privacy watchdog Marc Rotenberg said Facebook is giving users whiplash by "constantly changing the rules for access to user data."
"And Facebook telling users that it's on them to check their privacy setting is not right," said Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Zuckerberg said the initial rollout marks the beginning of Facebook's years-long investment in Graph Search that will eventually be available on mobile and in more languages.
The feature has been in the works for years. Current rudimentary search capability on Facebook has been clunky and mostly useless.
The effort kicked into high gear in spring 2011, when Zuckerberg recruited Lars Rasmussen from Google to join Facebook's search team. Rasmussen's challenge: to make it easier for Facebook users to discover information about the people they care about and connect with people with similar interests. Rasmussen was soon joined by another former Google employee, Tom Stocky.
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