At their headquarters in Menlo Park, Mark Zuckerberg, Lars Rasmussen, and Tom Stocky announced a project they've been working on for the past year: Graph Search.
Called "one of the three pillars to the Facebook system" (the other two being the news feed and the timeline), Graph Search will give users the ability to search through the 1 billion people, 240 billion photos and 1 trillion connections currently in the Social Graph.
Designed to answer questions from "Who are my friends in San Francisco" to "TV shows software engineers like", Graph Search makes use of all of the data users have entered into their profiles to return meaningful results from four areas: people, photos, interests, and places.
Also stressed today were privacy concerns. For example, if someone searches for "photos of software engineers at Facebook", results will only include users who have made it public knowledge that they're software engineers at Facebook. Otherwise, they won't appear.
In addition, Facebook has partnered with Bing to complement search results with results from the Web. Bing appears to provide web results when the Graph Search needs a boost.
Zuckerberg said, "Tomorrow we are going focus on Mobile, all languages, posts and open graph," but today would only be a "limited beta" and would be "rolling out very slowly." He also didn't rule out eventually working with Google, saying "I would love to work with Google, but we have not been able to work something out with [them]."