At a press event on Tuesday, Facebook unveiled a new way for its users to proactively seek out Facebook content, including social network games.
Dubbed "Graph Search" (currently in beta), the new feature does not function the same way as keyword-based web searches. Facebook's Tom Stocky and Lars Rasmussen explained in a statement:
"Graph Search and web search are very different. Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: "hip hop") and provide the best possible results that match those keywords. With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: "my friends in New York who like Jay-Z") to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that's been shared on Facebook. We believe they have very different uses.
Another big difference from web search is that every piece of content on Facebook has its own audience, and most content isn't public. We've built Graph Search from the start with privacy in mind, and it respects the privacy and audience of each piece of content on Facebook. It makes finding new things much easier, but you can only see what you could already view elsewhere on Facebook."
This early version of Graph Search focuses on searches for people, photos, places and interests, including games. One search example that Facebook used was "Strategy games played by friends of my friends."
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With the millions of players of Facebook games, I'd think the issue is that they can't find good games, or games that provide the experiences they are looking for. Discoverability of select content rather than simply having a 'GAMES' button.
How front and centre do games have to be before Facebook does enough to funnel the idiots(By idiots, I mean people that want games and can't think to click on app center or game ads on the sidebar) our way? It's not like this is OnLive or anything, and games are a secondary service provided by the platform.