Facebook’s big announcement on Tuesday wasn’t a Facebook phone, as many expected. Instead, the social networking giant unveiled a new feature that could make their less-than-stellar search capabilities a real competitor for internet review and ranking sites.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced Graph Search at a much-hyped live event yesterday. The feature will enable users to search not just randomly through connections’ names, groups, and networks, but actually search the data within all those connections. This could produce lists of friends divided by hometowns, relationship statuses, interests, or even lists favorite restaurants among your connections (based of Foursquare check-ins, I’m assuming).

Unfortunately, it appears no graphs are involved. C’mon Zuck, internet nerds LOVE visualizing data over time.

I’m still unclear exactly what the practical uses of this are, aside from the site’s example of setting up friends on blind dates. Graph Search seems like another way get those already hooked on the site to spend more time there mining information, though Zuckerberg stressed that only data made available by users would be accessible in search.

I was eager to see what Graph Search actually looked like, but it is currently in beta testing with select users. Eager Facebookers can get on the waiting list to be the next trial subjects.

What do you think? Are you excited for Graph Search?

[via NBC News]

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