Under the Hood: Building out the infrastructure for Graph Search by Sriram Sankar, Soren Lassen, and Mike Curtiss.
From the post:
In the early days, Facebook was as much about meeting new people as keeping in touch with people you already knew at your college. Over time, Facebook became more about maintaining connections. Graph Search takes us back to our roots and helps people make new connections–this time with people, places, and interests.
With this history comes several old search systems that we had to unify in order to build Graph Search. At first, the old search on Facebook (called PPS) was keyword based–the searcher entered keywords and the search engine produced a results page that was personalized and could be filtered to focus on specific kinds of entities such as people, pages, places, groups, etc.
Entertaining overview of the development of the graph solution for Facebook.
Moreover, reassurance if you are worried about “scaling” for your graph application. 😉
I first saw this at: This Week’s Links by Trevor Landau.