Graph Search (And Steamed Beets)

Originally, this post was going to be centered around the absolutely ridiculous amount of people with colds at my workplace, which has turned it from a place of relative quiet into an ear-deafening sea of non-stop coughing. However, there’s not much more to say about this besides, “Eeeeewwww!” and, “Hasn’t anybody ever heard of cough drops?!”

Instead, in a transparent attempt to be contemporarily relevant, I’m shifting my attention to Facebook and its new feature Graph Search, which is a horrible name to say the least. Without going into details, mainly because I’ve only spent about two minutes total reading about it, it’s an overhaul of the search box that allows you to type in naturally phrased questions and then displays results based on the personnel information people were dumb enough to have entered at one point or another and exposed through various privacy settings.

So, I assume I could use it to ask, “How many of my male friends like Rascal Flatts?” Upon getting the results, I could then mock them all mercilessly, without having had to check all of their individual profiles to gather that information. How helpful!

Apparently, this search doesn’t supersede (big word of the day!) the privacy settings that a given user has set up, so only the information you choose to expose can be found and returned. Still, in an absolutely non-surprising turn of events, this has raised a tidal wave of outrage from people complaining about how Facebook is exploiting their users’ personnel information for their own gain, to which the obvious reply is, “Duh. How have you not caught on to this yet?”

I also read that the search results are heavily based upon what you’ve “liked”. To me, this sounds like a golden opportunity for mischief, and I figure that everybody should “like” things they really don’t, in order to skew future searches and return amusing results. For example, it’d be funny if a search for restaurant recommendations came back with something like Greasy Bob’s Bait Shop And Drive-Thru. (Motto: “Ecologically sound! Whatever we don’t use for one, we put in the other!”)

With that in mind, I should go and “like” thing such as Jersey Shore, Honey Boo Boo, pushups, navel lint, gigantic federal bureaucracies, and steamed beets.

But I won’t “like” Rascal Flatts. I still have my dignity.