Facebook Unveils Graph Search, A People-Powered Search Engine

Owen ThomasWe're at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., where the company has invited us to "see what we're building," according to the invitation we got last week.

What it's building: Graph Search, a powerful new search engine which people can use to find people, places, photos, and interests, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.

Engineers demonstrated how the search tools can be used for recruiting, dating, and local-business searches, among others, launching Facebook into competition with a host of companies it hadn't previously threatened directly.

Hundreds of thousands of people currently have access to the new search tool, a small fraction of Facebook's user base.

Zuckerberg emphasized that Graph Search was very different from Google and Microsoft's Web search, though it does use Microsoft's Bing as a backup when it can't find relevant answers within Facebook's databases.

Here's our blow-by-blow account of the announcement: