Taylor Buley writes:

“Zuck asked me to work on search in the late spring of 2011,” he writes, recounting the first of three walks with Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder “had a very strong vision for what he wanted and how compelling a structured search product over the content people have shared on Facebook could be.”

In another answer regarding the timing of releases, he explained how his team “showed the original prototype of what we much later named Graph Search in the early summer of 2011.” This prototype only took a few weeks to build, he said, but the project did source code from “previous prototypes of structured search products that were not based on natural language.”

Thus we know Facebook had played with the idea of a non-natural-language search product at least some point before the summer of 2011. This lends credence to rumors that circulated in 2010 of a search project built atop the freely indexable Open Graph tags standard it launched in summer of 2010.

What held up Graph Search development between the early prototypes and the January 2013 launch? Too many smart people at Facebook, perhaps. In a question regarding the “best and worst” of working at Facebook, Rasmussen discusses the pitfalls of having a company “chock full of passionate, brilliant, opinionated people.” The problem? “Sometimes it takes longer than I’d like to arrive at an answer.

I bolded the passage above because I found it fascinating that he has a vision for this.

Lars Rasmussen's Ask Me Anything:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18jb6d/i_am_the_pointyhaired_engineering_director_for/

The inside story of graph search:

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/01/the-inside-story-of-graph-search-facebooks-weapon-to-challenge-google

Version 3.0 or 4.0 is going to be spooky and awesome.

Yes, and it will also be the reason many people shut down their Facebook accounts.