Its success is based on understanding how people are wired: how they present themselves, what they remember, whom they trust, and now, how they seek information.
Facebook this month introduced a search tool to help users find answers to many kinds of questions. But before it did, it assembled an eclectic team to scrutinize what users were searching for on the site — and how.
The team included two linguists, a Ph.D. in psychology and statisticians, along with the usual cadre of programmers. Their mission was ambitious but clear: teach Facebook’s computers how to communicate better with people.
Kathryn Hymes, 25, who left a master’s program in linguistics at Stanford to join the team in late 2011, said the goal was to create “this natural, intuitive language.” She was joined last March by Amy Campbell, who earned a doctorate in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley.
When the team began its work, Facebook’s largely ineffective search engine understood only “robospeak,” as Ms. Hymes put it, and not how people actually talk. The machine had to be taught the building blocks of questions, a bit like the way schoolchildren are taught to diagram a sentence. The code had to be restructured altogether.
Loren Cheng, 39, who led what is known as the natural language processing part of the project, said the search engine had to adjust to the demands of users, a great variety of them, considering Facebook’s mass appeal. “It used to be you had to go to the computer on the computer’s terms,” Mr. Cheng said. “Now it’s the user.”
The heart of the research took place in a lab at the Facebook offices here. Hidden behind one-way glass, team members watched users playing with different versions of a search engine and filled notebooks with observations. On occasion, the engineers tore out their hair.
They consulted dictionaries, newspapers and parliamentary proceedings to grasp the almost infinite variety of ways people posed questions. Then they trained the algorithms to understand what was meant. They tested tweaks to the search tool, as they do with every product, and measured how certain groups of people responded.
The project represents how Facebook builds products. It studies human behavior. It tests its ideas. Its goal is to draw more and more people to the site and keep them there longer.
What it builds is not exactly a replica of how people interact offline, said Clifford I. Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford who specializes in human-computer interaction. Rather, it reflects an “idealized view of how people communicate.”
“The psychology they are drawing on is not pure psychology of how humans communicate,” Professor Nass said, “but the psychology of what makes people stay around, spend time on site and secondarily, what makes people click the advertisements.”
It explains why there is a “like” button but not a “dislike” button; negative emotions turn people away, he said. The very principle of the like button is based on a psychological concept known as homophily: the notion that people like similar kinds of people and things. The reason profile pictures pop up every time a Facebook friend is used in a Sponsored Story advertisement is that people remember faces better than words.
Facebook constantly tests and tweaks its features for its diverse, global audience, paying close attention to the responses. The search tool, in its first iteration, answers queries by mining some of the data at the company’s disposal, including photos, interests and likes. It will eventually mine status updates and other activities, from what users eat to where they hike. The introduction is especially slow, Facebook executives have said, so they can better test what works and what does not.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/business/how-facebook-taught-its-search-tool-to-understand-people.html?partner=rss&emc=rss