Searching social media for people and for what people have posted, "liked," etc., is now a critical task for a broad range of researchers, including journalists, police, private investigators, human resource departments, threat-assessment departments, recruiters, and marketers looking for prospects. A very significant portion of such searching is to follow what is being said about companies and their brands and to identify and follow opinions, trends, and sentiments. This article looks at searching the largest and most active social media site, Facebook.
Basic Facebook search functions
For researchers, most Facebook searches fall into one of two “needs” categories:
- identifying those people who have a particular characteristic or combination of characteristics, such as name, residence, occupation, etc.; and
- finding specific, or maximum amounts of, material regarding a specific individual. Facebook has its own search features described below, but alternative approaches discussed later can take you much further.
First, be aware that what will be returned in a Facebook search and the ranking of those results are very different from a Google (or Bing or Yahoo) search. Facebook emphasizes that “search results are based on your Facebook activity. Facebook search results aren’t influenced by activity off Facebook.” In another statement, Facebook adds that ranking is also based on "the activity of the Facebook community."
In Facebook’s search box you can enter names or topics and, to some degree, "natural language" statements such as "friends who live in Annapolis." Beyond cases such as that, natural language searching does not usually work well and certainly not for a query such as people who live in Annapolis and attended Salisbury University. Beyond the names that you retrieve, you are shown records that somewhere mention one or more of your search terms, usually arranged by category, such as People, Links, Photos, etc.
Personalized search suggestions
When entering your terms in the search box, notice the search suggestions offered as you type. As a recent enhancement, Facebook now includes suggestions for topics, issues, and shared links that are of interest to large numbers of users. For example, after typing
brexit, the following suggestions appear: brexit news, brexit latest news, brexit explained, brexit jokes, etc. When you select one of these suggestions, you see not just posts from friends, but also public posts from people with whom you are not "friended."
This may appear obvious, but if you are "investigating" a person and don’t want that individual to know it, search from an account other than your personal account. (You should already be aware that "It’s against the Facebook Community Standards to maintain more than one personal account." It is, however, permissible to set up a separate Facebook "Page." Pages are created for businesses, organizations, public figures, etc.)
Narrowing search results
Facebook offers two main ways to narrow your search results: a menu for narrowing by content type (posts, videos, etc.) and filters for specific characteristics of each specific content type.
- Content Type—Near the top of search results pages, there is a menu for narrowing down your results by Posts, People, Photos, Videos, Marketplace, Pages, Places, Category, Groups, Apps, Events, and Links. For almost all of these, there are content-specific search filters.
- Filter Results—On the left side of results pages are Facebook filter options, divided into six overall options. Under the Posts From option, you can choose Anyone, You, Your Friends, Your Groups and Pages, Public, or Choose a Source. The latter may be the most useful of all the filter choices since this is where you can locate all the posts on a specific topic from a specific individual. Search the topic, then narrow to the individual.
In the Post Type filter section, you can choose from All Posts or Posts You’ve Seen. The Posted in Group section gives options for Any Group, Your Groups, or Choose a Group. For results from a specific group, you can also go directly to the page for that group and use the search box found there.
In the Tagged Location section, you can specify a location, and in the Date Posted section, you can choose a specific month and year. The tagged location and date options used together can be particularly helpful when investigating crimes, accidents, and other events.
Alternatives to Facebook’s Own Search Features
'Building your own URL’
In 2013, Facebook introduced what it called Graph Search. Graph enabled the user to search for multiple criteria at one time, in a (somewhat) natural language format. Graph Search, in a fairly transparent way, nicely offered both field searching and Boolean operations. It allowed users, for example, to enter in the search box, friends who live in Baltimore and work for McCormick. Unfortunately for serious searchers, in late 2015, Graph disappeared (to some degree out of Facebook concerns for privacy issues). Though the natural language part of the plan wasn’t perfect, Graph did work well in many situations.
The good news is that it was quickly recognized that, although Graph Search was gone, the retrieval coding that Graph used is still there. This coding can be taken advantage of and “invoked” by URLs that searchers can fairly easily construct and enter into the URL box of their browsers. These constructed URLs point your browser to Facebook and carry instructions to identify those records (Facebook pages) that contain specific combinations of criteria and/or content.
In a regular Facebook search you can enter multiple terms, but terms you enter are, for the most part, searched “free-text” through all parts of records. Facebook does not distinguish whether you are looking for Salisbury as the city of residence, a university, or part of a person or company’s name. Searching by URL can solve that problem.
Though readers might understand the URL constructing process from one fairly complex example, for clarity, I will lay out how it works using a few successively more-complex examples. (The first two, simplest, examples are actually for queries that would work reasonably well with a regular Facebook search. It is the more complex URLs that actually bring in field searching and Boolean.)
Note that your device needs to be logged on to some Facebook account in order for these URLs to work.
The examples presented here should give the reader enough background and details to try out this approach and perhaps enough information to fully meet the reader’s needs for ongoing use of the techniques. However, what is included here just scratches the surface in terms of the potential and extent of the overall technique.
At the end, some very helpful resources for further exploration are given. Additionally, if constructing URLs yourself isn’t appealing, you are also shown two third-party interfaces that construct and submit searches for some one- and two-variable queries (for example, name and employer).
Examples of building a Facebook (Graph) URL
Very basic example—Searching for users with the name John Oliver:
facebook.com/search/str/John Oliver/users-named
In this example, facebook.com/search points to Facebook’s search function and str says that a string of characters is to be searched. John Oliver provides the string of characters to be searched. users-named specifies that the name field in user profiles is the field to be searched.
Second example—For a search of people who currently live in Philadelphia, you use:
facebook.com/search/str/philadelphia/pages-named/residents/present
Here, pages-named tells Facebook to look within pages for the just-identified string (Philadelphia).
residents/present says to look in the “lives in” part of profiles. (For former residents, you would use residents/past.)
Example—Combining name and residence in the two searches above:
facebook.com/search/str/John Oliver/users-named/str/philadelphia/pages-named/residents/present/intersect
In this example, intersect has to be added to create the intersection (Boolean “AND”) of the two criteria (strings). For statements where you need to create the “union” of criteria (Boolean “OR”) you would use union instead of intersect.
Example containing a name, place of current residence, and current job:
facebook.com/search/str/smith/users-named/str/detroit/pages-named/residents/present/str/bartender/pages-named/employees/present/intersect
For past employment, you would use employees/past.
Perhaps stating the obvious, instead of constantly re-creating these URLs from scratch, a searcher might create a URL such as the one just shown, then add that page to your bookmark toolbar and thereafter use that bookmarked page as a search template. Sources mentioned later provide all the possible search pieces available.
Investigating detailed data for a specific Facebook user
Even if you have “friended” a person, going to that person’s page will not necessarily show you all the data actually on Facebook. Much additional information about an individual may be found by using a person’s Facebook ID (FBID) in a URL you build. You of course need to know the FBID, which used to be found at the end of the URL for the person’s page but no longer is. You can now find it by going to the person’s page and clicking on the “About” link. Look then at the second number in the URL of that page. (It will have an “A” in front of it. That (without the “A”) is the person’s user number.
For a user with a user number of 1151148113, construct a URL beginning with facebook.com/search/ followed by the subject’s user number, followed by the data item you wish to see, such as “photos-liked”:
facebook.com/search/1151148113/photos-liked
Using this approach, you may retrieve any one of more than 300 possible data items.
Especially in police work, knowing who a subject’s friends are can be tremendously useful. For all the above data items listed, you can try applying any of the above to the subject’s friends’ Facebook pages.
Example:
facebook.com/search/1151148113/friends/photos-by
Find a subject’s FBID and try the “friends” data item, then try friends/friends (friends of friends) or friends/photos-of, etc.
As you explore, keep in mind that most Facebook users don’t have on their pages all of the types of data items even appearing in the short list just given.
Bottom line
In-depth searching of Facebook isn’t necessarily easy, but it can be well worth the effort.
