The Design Process Behind Facebook Graph Search

Co.Design talks with Facebook Graph Search designer Russ Maschmeyer about escaping the search engine’s oldest paradigm. Facebook hopes people will ask Graph Search different questions than they ask other search engines. The new product surfaces any combination of people, places, photos, and interests on command, and the more complex the query, the more precise its answer. Recruiters might be interested in queries such as “friends of friends who are engineers at Google.” Travelers might want to know “what cities have my friends visited this year.” And the search for “friends of friends who are single and . . . ” has endless permutations. “One of the biggest design problems that we had to solve is how can we make it so people can ask these questions that can be very precise in a natural and intuitive way,” explained Mark Zuckerber...