Bye, Facebook Graph Search

booleanstrings Boolean, OSINT 5 Comments

On Friday, June 7th, Facebook Graph Search stopped working. “Hand-made” URLs and tools Intelligence Search, SearchIsBack, StalkScan, and others, no longer work. (I believe it’s a permanent change).

Needless to say, the drop in functionality badly affects Sourcers and, especially, OSINT people.

Searches that used to have URLs with Facebook IDs and pieces like “visitors” and “likers” combined, now look cryptic. For example, this is a search for people who like Python:

https://www.facebook.com/search?f=Abq-pIiVvwHAJmfSUMl_vchT_biNIpETyYhtdUCE4QM7kBQbp0V6cMOjtQL-wx1JksGSgJpmf-RPgvjMPwC9tsAu4oQYqjxBNKgRlv0GAOM-sw.

OSINT Researchers, notably, Henk van Ess, have been hard at work trying to figure out which former-Graph searches can still be performed.

Dan Nemec has posted ways to decode various search URLs.

I have been playing with various URLs and found that this search would find people who like Python and are living or lived in London. I constructed it combining two URLs – one, for people who live in London, and two, for people who like Python. This method can be reused to bring back some of the Graph.

However, at this point, we don’t know what we can and cannot search for, compared with the good old Graph. For example, we don’t know whether we can find Spanish-speaking female Software Engineers living in San Francisco.

It’s an interesting challenge for Sourcers!

We will share ways to work around this in the upcoming Facebook Webinar on June 18th, 2019. Seating is limited at the webinar – sign up now!

 

 

 

Comments 5

  1. How was the webinar? Did you find out if FB is coming back with a diff version that has some of the previous search functionality? If not, is there another tool that you would recommend that has some of the original search functionality?
    Thx for post!

    1. Post
      Author
      1. Post
        Author

Leave a Reply to Cesar Zabala Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *