Facebook search tool

After years of collecting photos and personal data from its billion-plus members, Facebook Inc. Tuesday unveiled a search tool that sifts through people's profiles—and pushes the social network deeper into Google Inc.'s home turf.

The two companies are vying to become the primary gateway to the Internet. Google has long served as a destination to find websites and information; Facebook, to share gossip and photos with friends. But those distinctions are increasingly blurring, and billions in advertising dollars are at stake.

The social network said Tuesday it will enable members to conduct complex queries related to their friends' profiles, such as "tourist attractions in France visited by my friends."

In doing so, Facebook is attacking Google's core strength and its most lucrative product—search—in a bid to convince people they might not need to use Google to find information

Google generates the majority of its $40 billion in annual revenue world-wide from selling ads on its search engine. In the U.S., Google was projected to make more than $13 billion in search-ad revenue, or 75% of the entire market, in 2012, according to research firm eMarketer Inc.

Google's repository of information remains unmatched. It said it has indexed 30 trillion unique Web pages across 230 million sites. Last year, Google changed its search engine to make it easier for people to quickly get detailed information about people, places and real-world things by displaying photos, facts and other "direct answers" to search queries at the top of the search-results page, rather than just links.

Having witnessed Facebook's rise and anticipating its move into search, Google built its own social-networking service, Google+, in 2011 to obtain data about specific individuals by name, their personal interests and the identities of their friends. It then integrated Google+ with its Web-search service, so that people searching for a particular website, local restaurant or real-world product will be alerted if any of their Google+ contacts previously rated it positively or negatively.

A Google spokesman declined to comment.

But Facebook has a far larger social network and a sizable head-start after spending years encouraging its members to add photos and all sorts of personal information to their profiles, from basic data like location, employer name and interests to more sensitive details such as age, religion and romantic status.

Much of that data is now searchable using Facebook's new "Graph Search" feature after more than a year in development. Facebook began rolling it out Tuesday as a test to a limited number of users. For Web searches that Facebook can't deliver, the queries are served by Bing, the search engine from Facebook partner Microsoft Corp.