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Comment by monkeyfacebag | Hacker News Reader

Graph Search seems like strange branding to me. I almost didn't click the link because I thought "Graph Search" was a new API and not a user-facing product (to be fair, the context was a posting on HN so I was predisposed to think API). Graph Search's real focus appears to be on the use of natural language and the presentation of/interaction with data. The "Graph" is almost the least interesting about it.

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Yeah, I agree the branding is odd. To most people, graph still means a dimly remembered plot of sin(x) rather than, you know, a network.

Of course OpenGraph wasn't either open or a graph, but then that was a developer product.

I don't think that branding is for users. I think users will always just see "Facebook Search" when this is eventually rolled out broadly. The "Graph" part of "Graph Search" is for us geeks and for Wall Street. The idea is to obviously differentiate this against Google's "Web Search", "Image Search", and other Thing-Searches.

I agree, this is a terrible name. Their executives don't go outside enough. "Graph Search" means precisely nothing to the average joe.

Is it called that because it is leveraging many feature from the OpenGraph API? Could I accomplish similar things with the API?

I think they chose the name as an homage to the name of how the data is represented from an engineering standpoint. A graph is a data structure that has many nodes connected together. In this case, a node is a person, photo, location, etc, and the edges represent how they are related to each other.

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