Ask HN: What happened to Facebook graph search?

I recall a few years ago being able to create really meanifull and helpfull queries on facebook like:

Friends of friends who like mountain biking and live in New Zealand

However it seems that facebook's search has been dumbed down. Were the searches too computationally intensive or abused in some form?

Any FB employees care to chime in as to what happened?

I miss this as well, but only used it for location based searches to get complete lists while traveling.

My guess is that the infrastructure required wasn't worth it.

I'm pretty sure they were abused in the way that child neglect is abuse: nobody except a minority of people like us ever used it.

I remember using it quite often, although results were mixed.

It seemed that the true potential wasn't possible without compromising privacy completely – i. e. I'd love to run queries of "people working at the White House who have attended events with (me|Osama bin Laden)" but I wouldn't want to show up in searches if other people used it.

Facebook is already battling pretty large privacy concerns with a lot of media scrutiny. There's a lot of danger in having a tool like the graph search available to people with malicious intent. The EFF had a good post on the subject from back when it was active [1].

When you're part of a network as big as Facebook's, at a certain point your own privacy settings don't matter very much, because the people you're connected to can generally fill in the gaps about whatever you may want to keep private.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/facebook-graph-search-...

It's imortant to keep in mind that metadata alone says a lot about a person. Combine that with more precise data from a few people in the same set and you can end up with very accurate data about everybody.