Google, meet Facebook's OpenGraph Search

With the introduction of the OpenGraph Protocol, Facebook introduces a new concept of searching throughout the Web. Facebook's search works based on what they call "connections" between resources from their OG ontology. Their algorithms are capable of discovering related items to the input query, based on the individual's social neighborhood or perhaps on the frequency of hitting the (now famous) "Like" button. Sounds like a bundle of possibilities, doesn't it ?

FaceRank, the Social Relevance Algorithm

Of course, this is not something Facebook officially announced (it would sound corny, don't you think ?), but the point is, after long 10 years, finally there is a serious candidate to best the PageRank, or at least complement with it. But Google works fine, the whole world searches, people are happy! Why would anyone use Facebook's new lab gadget instead of tested, proven, mature, lightning-fast and precise tool? Well because, there are queries that Google Search simply cannot satisfy! Moreover, their results are based on statistical methods, no people are involved there. What makes Facebook different is the capability to deliver real-time results , fresh and relevant , without deploying complex calculations . If some event is popular, people will rapidly talk about it. Same as with Google, it will be up to the web masters to annotate their web pages with the metadata, but the key differential factor here is that Facebook has the feedback from the users. It can use the number of "Like" hits to give weight to popularity of some particular web page. What if someone puts false metadata? (One of the biggest problems in the Semantic Web, too). In this case, the answer is simple: people will not like it, they will simply ignore it if it is misleading, hence it will be less popular and will have lower positioning. Another advantage from using this approach is that metadata now contains the context of the resource, opening the gates for bringing the conventional Semantic Web Dream . Facebook  is now able to interpret user's query, does she search for related books, movies, sport teams, people... you name it, it finds it... in real time. As written in Times: Google, This Time, Its Personal.

Hey Mark, Recommend Me a Movie, Please

When someone says: "Yeah, the idea of the Semantic Web is great, but if it so wonderful, how come there are no applications to massively leverage it? You say the technology is available for a while.", usually made some point, but I think not anymore. With Facebook's ultimate way of Social Bookmarking, it becomes easily calculable of what users could want, on individual level ! How, you may ask ?

Here is what I am at. (This may be a real idea for semantic application, too). Suppose you want to watch a movie, but you are not really sure what you want to watch... Naturally, you would ask your friends or you would search through the Internet a bit to see where is the movie hype cloud at the moment... (did you realize I said, "at the moment"? Hang on.). Now imagine a widget, that simply communicates the Facebook via OpenGraph API, to check what movies do you like. The widget also supposes that since you like those movies, you have probably watched them, so it makes no sense to suggest them to you again. But how difficult it is, to write a query that says:

"Give me the most popular movies that are related to the comedies I like". We define "related to" as a simple rule: "A movie is related to another if X people that watched the first movie also watched the second. The movie gains ranking in relatedness if at least Y of that people are my friends. The movie gains ranking if there are at least Z pages with more than 50 likes on the Web". 

Hmmm, not so difficult to be written in a query language. For now some of these aspects are not covered in the OpenGraph ontology (I refer to the Movie Genre), but undoubtly, it could easily be added. On the other side, for the application user, it is as simple as logging in to Facebook, and pressing the "Recommend" button. Welcome to the Semantic reality, Neo. Btw, how do you write "My favorite movies" in Google ? :)

But appart from the interesting search ideas the OpenGraph brings, my deepest beliefs are that Facebook's reason number one to introduce this protocol has e-Marketing roots i.e. to deliberately interfere with Google's primary business model - with personalized, perfect ad targeting tool .

What do you think ? Will this Facebook API bring new methods of warfare between the web titans ? Will it provide better searching for end-users ? Will ultimately, data find us ? How will Google eventually respond ? Is this the final gate that needed to be opened, for semantic applications to be massively written ?