One Year After Its Mega-Hyped Launch, Mark Zuckerberg Admits Graph Search Doesn't Work

Last January, Facebook unveiled a major feature that would make it directly competitive with Google: Graph Search.

Graph Search had a lot of promise. It was a social search bar that mined all of Facebook's content to answer questions such as "Which friends do X person and Y person have in common" and "which places did I visit in 2013."

But Graph Search proved complicated to use and faulty, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg knows it.

During an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeeks' Brad Stone, Zuckerberg said it was "generous" to suggest that Graph Search worked even half the time.

From Bloomberg BusinessWeek:

When it's suggested that Graph Search works about half the time, Zuckerberg says that's being generous. Vernal, the engineering vice president, says Graph Search was the last major product designed primarily for desktop computers. It's now being redesigned for phones. He cites the opportunity to use a user's location to deliver results relevant to where they are. If a user is traveling in New Zealand, for example, Facebook should serve up previous updates and insights from Facebook members who have visited Auckland. Vernal says harvesting all this data, amid some trillion status updates posted throughout Facebook's history, is "a multiyear journey."