Facebook Graph Search Important Changes

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Many people have noticed that tools that provide access to Facebook Graph searches, such as Shane McCusker’s Chrome extension or Searchisback, sometimes don’t produce results any longer. Using the Graph search directly, via URLs, we now also see some searches leading to empty pages. I want to bring some clarity to what has changed in the searches we have been using for sourcing and suggest some fixes.

As we know, we can search “by a string,” with the URLs including a) “/str/” b) Facebook IDs. For example, people who like pages named “Python” can be expressed as https://www.facebook.com/search/str/Python/pages-named/likers or https://www.facebook.com/search/7899581788/likers.

Here is the summary of changes:

1.  The “/str/” searches that include either “employees” or “students” no longer work. I.e., we can’t search “by a string” for employers, job titles, schools, and majors. (Example of a search that no longer produces results, only shows an empty page: https://www.facebook.com/search/str/google/pages-named/employees.)

2. Searching by IDs, we need to replace:

  • /major/students by /students
  • /job/employees by /employees

– then the searches involving those will start working again.

(Tools that will update the searches that they run in the background will also produce results, except for the searches outlined in “1.”, above).

Here is a variety of searches on Facebook that work.

Combinations:

There is one additional change I am aware of: “groups of a user” was https://www.facebook.com/search/100000155790214/groups – now (oddly) needs to be https://www.facebook.com/search/str/100000155790214/groups.

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