The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts • Hacker News Board

Re: The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts

#31

Post by Todd » Mon, Dec 29, 2014, 8:14 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #6

yincrash wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could build an index per person, but rather than search 500 indexes, the index of each person would be of all their and their friends' posts, so you would only search one index.

Doesn't that make updating rather expensive - for each new post it needs to go into a lot of different search indexes? Off-topic: Wasn't there a start-up a while back that was allowing people to build their own personal search index for their social media content?

You may be thinking of Greplin. I hadn't followed their story but it looks like they rebranded to Cue and were acquired by Apple.

Re: The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts

#32

Post by hnnewguy » Mon, Dec 29, 2014, 8:53 PM UTC

zxcdw wrote: post #30

adventured wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question - what's the fear in terms of what Facebook can or will do with that? That is, what can they do that would qualify what they have as power over someone?

Depends entirely on what they (and people related to them) have shared with Facebook directly and indirectly, and what Facebook actually can infer from the information. Apart from that I have no answer. However, I find it important to realize the question shouldn't be about what Facebook/whateverelse can "do" now , but what will "they" be able to "do" in the future . Imagine if there was some Superior Entity which kn…

>However, I find it important to realize the question shouldn't be about what Facebook/whateverelse can "do" now, but what will "they" be able to "do" in the future.

Exactly. It's not about Facebook or the authorities mining data for criminal activity. The problem occurs once the authorities have you in their sights, for whatever reason. With reams of private data available and no context, they can (and will) use it to paint any picture of you they need to.

Re: The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts

#33

Post by eastbayjake » Mon, Dec 29, 2014, 9:27 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #6

yincrash wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could build an index per person, but rather than search 500 indexes, the index of each person would be of all their and their friends' posts, so you would only search one index.

Doesn't that make updating rather expensive - for each new post it needs to go into a lot of different search indexes? Off-topic: Wasn't there a start-up a while back that was allowing people to build their own personal search index for their social media content?

Doesn't having a time-series index -- where new entries are only being added to the end of the index, never updating the middle of the index -- make it a little less expensive?