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Facebook's Graph Search takes on Google

It's not a phone: Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled a search engine for finding answers about your friends and their lives.

Nic Healey Senior Editor / Australia
Nic Healey is a Senior Editor with CNET, based in the Australia office. His passions include bourbon, video games and boring strangers with photos of his cat.
Nic Healey

It's official: Mark Zuckerberg was not lying when he said in September last year that Facebook would not being making a phone.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Credit: CNET)

Instead, what the company has been building and teasing people with is a search engine called Graph Search. The engine — which is still in beta, available to only a few people and only on the desktop for the time being — allows you to pose questions about friends' lives, using fairly natural language.

One example used in the press conference was "Friends of my friends who are single, male, San Francisco". Another was "photos of my friends before 1990".

Given the obvious privacy concerns about Graph Search, Zuckerberg stated that it was built with privacy in mind, and that this would be respected.

You can read a more detailed look at Graph Search from our CNET colleagues in the US, who attended the launch, by clicking here.