It got merged into the regular search bar - but the advanced features are only supported if your locale is set to US-English
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Ask HN: What happened to Facebook graph search?
21–30 of 41 posts
Re: Ask HN: What happened to Facebook graph search?
#22Normal people didn't care for that functionality so it was deemphasized in favor of different types of search. A lot of it still works, though.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to Facebook graph search?
#23URL/search experiments from 2015, which don't seem to work now: http://booleanblackbelt.com/2015/02/important-facebook-graph...
What do you mean by "doesn't seem to work"? The searches in that article either work for me, or return zero results. I was a part of the graph search beta, way back when, and live in the US, which is mentioned in another comment as possibly giving me more access.
This one came back with zero results: https://www.facebook.com/search/str/accountants%2Bwho%2Bwork...
Re: Ask HN: What happened to Facebook graph search?
#24It got merged into the regular search bar - but the advanced features are only supported if your locale is set to US-English
Wow...and for _years_ I thought I was in some annoying holdback pool... I had UK-English set just for the readable timestamps.
Just changed to US-English and Graph-esque searches work fine. Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: What happened to Facebook graph search?
#25I've done a reasonable amount of work (and even more investigation into) Graph search.
I believe the story is that they shipped it, and then found that the people who were using the most powerful parts the most weren't exactly the kind of customers they wanted.
Since then they have been modifying the API so less and less of it works. It is very difficult to work out exactly what and what doesn't work because it depends on the the account you are using and that account's relationships with the people and groups you are searching, as well as the rights each of those gives. The FB default permission schemes have changed significantly over time (to be less open) too.
Also, there seem to be bugs, and it is difficult to know what is intentional, what is because of permissions and what is a bug.
For example, it seems impossible to read posts made by other users to a page via the graph API even when that same account can read them when logged in interactively. This doesn't seem to be documented anywhere, and there are plenty of online sources showing code that seemed to have worked previously. So is it a bug or deliberate? Most seem to assume it is deliberate, but who really knows?
To be clear: I have no internal FB sources on this.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to Facebook graph search?
#26A little OT but reminds me of the design implications of Graph Search: the Friendship pages which were introduced in 2010 [0]
From what I remember, these were introduced but after awhile, seemed to be a feature that fell into obscurity. As in, you pretty much had to manually enter the URL. The feature still exists and it's highly welcome, IMO, when FB does the occasional "You and John Doe have been friends for 8 years. See your memories" type reminders.
But to manually see your friendship with a friend, at least on the Desktop version, you have to click the "..." menubox, in which other lesser used features (such as "Poke") are buried. And it's possible to view the mutual content between any two users by filling out this URL manually: facebook.com/friendship/friend1/friend2
But I'm guessing the latter functionality was never given prominent exposure due to how easily it could be used for stalking a current or ex-love interest? Sure, you could scour your targets' walls individually and make a note of all public photos/messages in which they mutually appear. But the Friendship view streamlined that process as much as the original News Feed streamlined old-fashioned profile browsing.
I'm having a hard time imagining that it was a feature that would be popular for innocent reasons -- I'm already inundated with news items about friends' activity on my newsfeed, why would I want to view a highly scoped newsfeed about two people who are not-me for innocent reasons, even if I were extremely bored and Facebook were the only site on the Internet?
[0] http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/friendship-pages-mutual-co...
Re: Ask HN: What happened to Facebook graph search?
#27It got merged into the regular search bar - but the advanced features are only supported if your locale is set to US-English
Oh! And here all this time I've been thinking they just never actually launched the feature.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to Facebook graph search?
#28Privacy, I would guess. For exemple, you could see that your Tinder match was from X town and liked A, B, F, G, K pages. You could then go in FB Graph and write "Girls from X who likes A, B, F, G, K pages". This returns two results and you find the girl. Even easier if you knew her first name, you could go "People named Z who likes ... in ... city."
I'll admit to doing this, along with reverse google image searches of profile pictures.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to Facebook graph search?
#29This happened:
Re: Ask HN: What happened to Facebook graph search?
#30Facebook 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 conne…
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.
Accurate enough to kill people, according to James Clapper.