A month after launching its vaunted Graph Search feature to much fanfare, Facebook is finally opening up a bit about how, exactly, it works. The product’s primary architect, Lars Rasmussen, took to Reddit yesterday in an Ask Me Anything session during which he elaborated (beyond what Om reported last month) on how Graph Search is built.
Of course, this being a Reddit discussion, Rasmussen answers a bunch of questions about the history of graph search, its privacy issues, his role with building Google Maps (and Wave) and his walks with Mark Zuckerberg. But here are some of the more-informative excerpts about the architecture itself.
I should point out, too, that we’ll be talking a bit about graph processing and graph databases at our Structure: Data conference next month, too. Graphs, as it turns out, are a great way to storing, processing and presenting a lot of data that has nothing to do with social connections.
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