Facebook invited scads of journalists to their headquarters today to reveal graph search, the social media giant's new search feature. What's the difference between graph search and a plain old Google web search? Zuckerberg explained the difference, saying, "a web search is designed to take any open ended query and give you links that might have answers. Graph search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, not give you links that might provide the answer."

Basically, it allows you to search for information based off of your friends likes and preferences. Per the press release:

Graph Search will appear as a bigger search bar at the top of each page. When you search for something, that search not only determines the set of results you get, but also serves as a title for the page. You can edit the title - and in doing so create your own custom view of the content you and your friends have shared on Facebook.

Graph Search and web search are very different. Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: “hip hop”) and provide the best possible results that match those keywords. With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: "my friends in New York who like Jay-Z") to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that's been shared on Facebook. We believe they have very different uses.

As far as privacy goes, a bit of a stain on Facebook's otherwise not-so-sparkling reputation, TechCrunch reports that in "the upper-right of Facebook’s bar, you will find shortcuts to privacy settings" and that "the new Graph Search product will be integrated into privacy as well."

Facebook is the world's No. 1 social network with over 1 billion users.