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.
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