Facebook's Graph Search takes on Google

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

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.