Facebook announced on Wednesday that Graph Search has finally completely launched to all users in the United States (in English). About a month ago, the company indicated that the process to getting it to everyone in the country had begun.
“As a reminder, we introduced new privacy controls back in December and announced that we would be retiring the old ‘who can look up my timeline by name?’ setting in the coming months,” the company notes. “Now that people have had an opportunity to explore those tools, we are starting to retire this setting for the small percentage of people that use it.”
As has been discussed time and time again by various publications, including ourselves, nothing is changing on the privacy front with regards to what information about you people can actually see. What changes with Graph Search, however, is how people are able to find that information. It does give users a tool to directly search for information about you, and potentially surface your information and content in ways you may have never expected.
You may recall that Tumblr that shows some creepy examples, which will give you an idea of what’s possible.
Facebook notes in the announcement that it is continuing to work on other features for Graph search, like the ability to search for posts, comments, and of course Graph Search for mobile. The more of these features that make their way to Graph Search, obviously the more powerful Facebook will become as a search engine.
No word yet on when Graph search will be completely rolled out globally. Meanwhile, many people in the U.S. are still waiting to get the “new” News Feed.
In other related news, Facebook is making more changes to how the News Feed actually works, which the company will be discussing in a series of blog posts it kicked off on Tuesday.