It’s not what you get out of it that matters, it’s what you put in.
That is the real significance of Facebook’s inelegantly named Graph Search, the new “social” search engine it unveiled this week. The company that probably already knows more about you than any other single business would now like you to divulge one other, extremely valuable thing: what you want.
A deeper move by Facebook into search has been widely expected for a long time, and no wonder. It is hard to overstate the commercial significance of being able to divine someone’s needs and intentions at the very moment that they are at their strongest. There is nothing that does that quite like the search box.