With new search tool, Facebook is clearly trying to divert traffic and ad spending from its rival. (AP)

Facebook unveiled its social search tool in January but only made it available to a small fraction of its 1.1 billion users, as its engineers continued to tweak and test it. Over the next few weeks, starting on Monday, the company is rolling out the social search tool, called "Graph Search,'' to everyone whose language is set to US English.

Unlike searches on Google, which are good for finding specific things, Facebook's tool is useful in unearthing information about your social circles. Graph Search lets you find friends who live in San Francisco who are vegan. Friends of friends who live near you and like hiking. Photos of your boyfriend taken before you met him in 2010. Nearby restaurants that your friends like _ and so on.

But soon after Facebook launched the tool, the Internet had a field day with less innocuous and more embarrassing queries, showing just how much information people reveal about themselves on the site, intentionally or not. Care to find out which brand of condoms your friends prefer? Graph Search might tell you.

A blog called actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com posted a collection of searches ranging from "married people who like prostitutes'' to "current employers of people who like racism.'' Both yielded more than 100 people.

While it is possible that some of those Facebook users are fully aware that what they've shared.

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