Facebook's big announcement this week was the unveiling of its new smart search engine entitled graph search.
The internal search engine, which was revealed at an event in Palo Alto, California, allows the website's one billion users to easily search through their friends' content.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and chief executive, said that because graph search is internal, it is not a direct challenge to Google. However, if users cannot find an answer with it, Microsoft's Bing search engine will step in to help.
Its name comes from the idea of the social graph, a name attributed to the information shared among friends on Facebook. Data people can search includes photos, status updates, location data and "liked" things.
To pre-empt any privacy concerns, the website has insisted that there are limits in place on the search system, explaining that people will only be able to see content shared with them.
Graph Search is at present in a very early beta stage of development and will be made available to users slowly over the course of "weeks and months".
