Facebook to introduce new search feature today

Facebook users would soon see a different search bar than the one they have used so far.

Starting today, Facebook would start rolling out to all US users the advanced search feature it announced earlier this year.

Dubbed Graph Search, users would be able to use the tool for conducting more advanced searches and get detailed results.

According to the company, it would be a few weeks before everyone who used Facebook with the "US English" setting would have the new feature, but several hundreds of millions of people would get it this week, the company told ABC News. And after over six months of user testing and feedback, Facebook said it believed the product was ready for the masses.

"Over the past few months, tens of millions of people have helped improve the product just by using it and giving feedback," Facebook says in blog post, which will be published this morning.

The improvements would range from the speed of search to accuracy, and when people started  typing in a search it would start suggesting more relevant potential searches. Also, according to the company, it could better understand what people were searching for and would display the most relevant results first.

The new tool, rolled out to a limited number of users earlier this year, would appear as a bigger search bar at the top of each page, replacing the usual white search bar.

Unlike web search, however, which used a set of keywords to come up with results that best matched the search words, Graph Search combines phrases to return content from its own audience.

Realising that the new tool exposed a substantial amount of personal data that members might not realise was available for public scrutiny, Facebook had been working to allay users' privacy fears. According to commentators, the search feature could prove key to keeping users members engaged on the site.

The new feature was announced by Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg in January, who billed it as a new way find people, photos, places and interests that were most relevant to Facebook users. With the incorporation of various filters such as "place type," "liked by," and "visited by friends," users could use the structured search tool to find people in their network and uncover potential connections.