The Facebook vs. Google Battle for Search is ON - Facebook Launching Graph Search

The WAR for search is officially getting interesting for the first time in years, as Facebook this morning declared open war on all things Google, announcing 'Graph Search'.

What's Graph Search? It's a way to search all of Facebook's content, profiles and Tagged data in a way that they feel will be more useful than using Google to search 'everything'. It's an acqualization of what Google's been attempting to do for years with personalizing search, and they're using YOUR data to do it.

The project, which was spearheaded by Lars Rasmussen of Google Maps and Wave's fame officially enters beta today in the US.

As demo-ed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, you can now search for things like 'Who Are My Friends in San Francisco' or 'Show Me Pictures of My Friends from 2008' or more useful things like restaurants, food and music and it will attempt to bring data in, using ALL natural language searches and then places that your friends have been or topics that they talked about. Other examples included "Friends who like Star Wars" or "What music do my friends like" all taiolor to you.

Ok, so what about privacy which has NOT been a strongpoint when Facebook has unveiled features in the past? They claim that it's going to be privacy aware, only returning already available data about your friends.

The beta is ON!