Facebook introduces enhanced internal search tool

Menlo Park, Calif.—Facebook Inc. announced it plans to introduce an upgraded search tool that will allow users to find information, posts and preferences among their social connections.

Facebook's new Graph Search, being rolled out over the next several weeks, can find people, pictures, interests (including “likes”) and places cited by others on the social site. It is considered an improvement over Facebook's previous search function, which was limited to finding people and businesses.

Microsoft Corp.'s Bing search engine has partnered with Facebook on Graph Search, and its results will show up when Graph Search doesn't find a Facebook-located result. At a presentation Tuesday, Facebook Chairman-CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the new tool could compete with sites that specialize in job recruiting, such as LinkedIn, or review sites like Yelp.