Facebook has decided to enter the world of search engines with their newly innovated Graph Search. They’ve outlined their newest stalking enhancement soon to be added to the social media site in a press release:

“Graph Search and web search are very different. Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: ‘hip hop’) and provide the best possible results that match those keywords. With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: ‘my friends in New York who like Jay-Z’) to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that’s been shared on Facebook. We believe they have very different uses.”

Generally speaking, search engines are used to answer questions. So, what can Facebook offer to the nearly perfected search industry? Well, Mark Zuckerberg took it upon himself to answer this very question.

“We can answer a set of questions that no one else can really answer. All those other services are indexing primarily public information, and stuff in Facebook isn’t out there in the world — it’s stuff that people share. There’s no real way to cut through the contents of what people are sharing, to fulfill big human needs about discovery, to find people you wouldn’t otherwise be connected with. And we thought we should do something about that. We’re the only service in the world that can do that.”

In other words, what Facebook has to offer is: you, your mother, and me. Our opinions, preferences, and likes will now be a searchable commodity. It has been proven that people trust friend reviews over media, so essentially this will allow users to search word of mouth in a much more convenient way.

One has to ask if this new feature is necessarily a good thing? Will Facebook going become the new Wikipedia? Will the next generation cite Facebook search queries on their Works Cited pages? I surely hope not, but we do live in a time of Gangnam Style and Honey boo boo child, so it is best to not write it off as impossible.