Gadgetory

mmm hey this is Thomas Houston from the verge and we're checking out Facebook's new graph search beta just launched today it's slowly rolling out and the first thing that you'll notice is that it's a pretty big redesign visual redesign of the top bar up here and so you have a universal search bar that's available across the site and over here your notifications which were formerly over here had been moved over here and you have a couple tweaks on icon design but really what the big news here today is completely new search and so you can start out really simple and just search for restaurants nearby and we're in New York it's actually a little slow it's definitely a lot slower than searching on Google but you'll find pretty quickly just you know a lot of restaurants nearby over here you'll see there's a refined section so you can go in and say you know if you prefer you could look for brunch you could look for a cafe you can find a bar so if you want to get a little more specific you'd find bars nearby that my friends like and click that and now here's a list of bars that my friends have liked and so it's not necessarily just restaurants you can add a lot of modifiers so you could say let's say you want to find restaurants in California that Robert Scoble likes which is actually search that you can do and it'll pretty quickly bring these up so it's not just bars and restaurants you can you can also apply this to people and you can apply it to photos and quite a few other things so you can also search for friends at the verge younger than 25 which is pretty specific it'll bring up a result friend to work at the birds that are under 25 just a few of us and so you could also find movies that my friends like and you get a list of movies that your friends have liked you can go in and you can refine you can you know pull down to things that I've like just that your family has liked and you can actually change the page type so you can look for athletes my friends have liked political views regions religion you know all sorts of great places to get into arguments so the other big announcement here today from facebook is that Bing is fully integrated here for web searches as well and so while a lot of this definitely highlights and definitely promotes searching within Facebook it is possible to search back outside of that ecosystem and and dive back into being so for example if you're searching for burritos it will slowly retrieve suggestions and you can look for mexican restaurants you can look for restaurants in minneapolis there's a burrito interest but if you click down here on web search this will take you to bing and it gives you search results within facebook from bing in case you somehow missed it the entire verge team was out in las vegas recently for the Consumer Electronics Show and you know be great to be able to search for all do all of those pictures so again if you haven't seen it before the natural language search is pretty good so you can say pictures of my co-workers in Las Vegas it'll pull up results you can click tab and return and it opens up and so if you dig into these you'll actually notice that they many of these are pretty old Zuckerberg said today that Instagram would eventually be added to this data but at the moment it's not but that should help a lot as far as availability you can sign up today to get on the waiting list but facebook says that it's going to be a pretty slow rollout this is version 1 and facebook is distinctly calling it a beta you