Under the Hood: Building Graph Search Beta

This post details the engineering challenges and solutions behind building Facebook's Graph Search beta. It describes the evolution from basic search systems to a comprehensive social graph search, the decision to build a single, scalable system rather than smaller targeted ones, and the development of a prototype parser. It highlights the infrastructure challenges, including scaling to over a billion users and consolidating three existing search systems into Unicorn. The post also discusses the critical privacy considerations and real-time checking required for complex queries. The future roadmap includes indexing posts and comments, and expanding to mobile and other languages.