Maybe I should begin by saying that I’m trying out Facebook’s new graph search using my old Mac laptop, OS 10.5.8, with Safari 5.0.6.
Maybe the age of those systems is contributing to the new search system’s abject failures here on day one.
If I do just one search — even just a simple search to get to a friend’s profile — I’m not able to do a second search without entirely reloading the Home page.
And if I’ve reloaded and click in the search bar, here’s the dropdown menu that appears:
If I click on “Movies My Friends Like” (surely that must be worth viewing, right?), I get a list topped by the 48 Hour Film Project Savannah (which is not a movie), CBGB the Movie (which only a handful of my friends have even seen since distribution is still months away), and Savannah the Movie (ditto).
And here’s the problem with Facebook’s prioritization in search of things that we have “liked”: often users “like” things that they don’t necessarily like. Yes, I want to keep caught up on new developments regarding CBGB, but I haven’t even seen the film; I want to follow the page, but I have NO idea if I actually like the movie.
From that lame list of Movies My Friends Like, when I try to type something else into the search bar, Facebook won’t even let me change it.
Once I’m back out to a clean search box, I can type in something like “Restaurants in Savannah that [insert friend’s name] likes”.
But that’s just more of a muddle. The list of results is a mishmash that includes places that this particular friend might have “liked” but are hardly her favorite spots. The second page of the results includes SubDogs (which is closed), Abe’s (which is not a restaurant), and Live Wire Music Hall (which is closed and which is not a restaurant).
How will any of this information prove truly useful?
I will be curious to hear others’ experiences with the new search function. Its debut on my screen has just made Facebook even more cumbersome.