14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook's Graph Search made quite a splash when it was announced, but as with most things Facebook does, perhaps even more so than with most things, the site is taking it very slow.
The feature is completely opt-in and only available to a few people. Facebook says that it's got a few hundreds of thousands of users at this point, but that's a very small portion of its one billion strong user base.
Even worse, it seems that the people that have enabled Graph Search aren't using it much or aren't using it properly, which is why Facebook has now published a list of "popular" to search for, or rather a list of things Facebook would want you to search for.
The first way most new users start searching with the Graph Search is to find friends, or more specific things about their friends. Facebook's examples are "Videos of my friends," "Photos of my friends before 2009" and so on.
Another popular use case, Facebook argues is finding photos, the natural language query makes it easier to filter for just the photos you need, things like "Photos by The New York Times" or "Photos of underwater photography."
The Graph Search is also useful for planning trips, Facebook says, for example, for finding hotels near where you plan to visit, ski resorts, or for looking back at places you've been to.
Finally, the Graph Search is great for discovering new things, like "Videos of TV shows liked by my friends" or "Apps my friends like."
All in all, this shows what Facebook is up against. Even if Graph Search is as smart as Facebook says it is, people aren't accustomed to using natural language in searches, you can blame 15 years of Google for that.
This is why Graph Search suggests searches as you type, but perhaps it isn't enough, or perhaps it just takes time.