I recall a few years ago being able to create really meanifull and helpfull queries on facebook like:<p>Friends of friends who like mountain biking and live in New Zealand<p>However it seems that facebook's search has been dumbed down. Were the searches too computationally intensive or abused in some form?<p>Any FB employees care to chime in as to what happened?
I've done a reasonable amount of work (and even more investigation into) Graph search.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>To be clear: I have no internal FB sources on this.
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].<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/facebook-graph-search-privacy-control-you-still-dont-have" rel="nofollow">https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/facebook-graph-search-...</a>
Interestingly, your query - "Friends of friends who like mountain biking and live in New Zealand" - still works for me and indeed, I see two friends of friends from New Zealand that like biking.
It possibly might have been scaled back along with the rest of their cuts to permissions in their Graph API in 2015: <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/</a><p>You could check how that changed over time: <a href="https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog" rel="nofollow">https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog</a><p>Not sure if they are the same, but it might be along the same lines of "We don't want to give everyone access to everything".
My source tells me people did not use graph search. Only engineers or programmers used it. The wide population is not used to searching in a structural format. The cost benefit ratio did not work out
Half of the answers are something like: "It would be super evil of Facebook to allow this kind of search".<p>The other half are like: "It does work".<p>Hmmmm...
Privacy, I would guess.<p>For exemple, you could see that your Tinder match was from X town and liked A, B, F, G, K pages.<p>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."
URL/search experiments from 2015, which don't seem to work now: <a href="http://booleanblackbelt.com/2015/02/important-facebook-graph-search-developments/" rel="nofollow">http://booleanblackbelt.com/2015/02/important-facebook-graph...</a>
The graph search was partially powered by Bing in the back end. So when the Microsoft/Facebook partnership ended, most of the search capability you're talking about had to be removed.<p>See (for example): <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2014/12/13/facebook-dumps-bing-will-introduce-its-own-search-tool/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2014/12/13/facebook-dumps-bing-will-i...</a>
I miss this as well, but only used it for location based searches to get complete lists while traveling.<p>My guess is that the infrastructure required wasn't worth it.
A little OT but reminds me of the design implications of Graph Search: the Friendship pages which were introduced in 2010 [0]<p>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.<p>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<p>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.<p>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?<p>[0] <a href="http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/friendship-pages-mutual-content/250559?red=if" rel="nofollow">http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/friendship-pages-mutual-co...</a>
FB's Graph API is not a stable API, there are frequent changes as to what information is accessible and what isn't.
Looks like there are similar issue with user facing features like graph search.
This happened:<p><a href="http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com" rel="nofollow">http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com</a>
Not an answer, but a bit of context: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/graphsearcher/" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/graphsearcher/</a>
The link on that page is just broken, not even a "we've removed this content for reasons".
It still works. You just need to use the GET API for reliable results.<p>E.g.<p>Friends of friends<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/friends/friends" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/friends/friends</a><p>Mutual friends of two people<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/friends/<id2>/friends/intersect" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/friends/<id2>/friends/...</a><p>Photos where both people are tagged<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/photos-tagged/<id2>/photos-tagged/intersect" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/photos-tagged/<id2>/ph...</a> or<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/photos-of/<id2>/photos-of/intersect" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/photos-of/<id2>/photos...</a><p>Photos recommended for a person<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos-recommended-for" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos-recommended-for</a><p>Photos liked by a person<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos-liked" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos-liked</a><p>Photos commented on by a person<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos-commented" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos-commented</a><p>Stories or posts liked by a person<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/stories-liked" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/stories-liked</a><p>There's plenty of other words operators and entities<p>IDs are numerical<p>Should get you started
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.<p>I remember using it quite often, although results were mixed.<p>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.