New feature on Facebook

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new search feature on Tuesday in the company's first staged event at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters since its May initial public offering.

Called graph search, the new service lets users search their social connections for information about people, interests, photos and places. It'll help users who, for instance, want to scroll through all the photos their friends have taken in Paris or search for the favorite TV shows of all their friends who happen to be doctors.

Until now, Facebook users were unable to search for friends who live in a certain town or like a particular movie. With the new feature, people can search for friends who, say, live in Boston who also like Zero Dark Thirty.

Zuckerberg says the search feature is privacy aware, which means users can search only for content that has been shared with them. Still, the company will have to make it clear to users that the new feature isn't unearthing information about them that wasn't already available.

Facebook stressed that graph search will be made available to users very slowly, beginning Tuesday. Though the company has focused on refining its mobile product for much of last year, the search feature will be available only on Facebook's website for now, and only in English. It will likely take more than a year for the search feature to be available to all of Facebook's more than 1 billion users.

Though Zuckerberg stressed that graph search is different from traditional Web search, the expanded feature escalates an already fierce duel between Google and Facebook as they grapple for the attention of Web surfers and revenue from online advertisers.

Although Facebook isn't trying to fetch information across the Web like Google does, it's clearly trying to divert traffic and ad spending from its rival. Facebook is hoping to do this by making it easier for its users to quickly find many of the things that are most important to them: movie, music and restaurant recommendations from friends and family; photo galleries of people they care about; and new connections to old friends and other people with common interests.