Facebook stops Graph Search

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Facebook has discontinued Graph Search, the search function that allowed users to perform detailed searches for photos, pages or other Facebook users. The tool was mainly used by researchers and journalists.

Several researchers report that the tools they built with Graph Search no longer work. Research collective Bellingcat, among others, says that ‘all tools related to Graph Search are offline.’ Facebook did not inform users of the tools in advance that they would be changed.

Graph Search was an api that allowed users to search very specifically for texts, but also filter results. For example, with Graph Search it was possible to see who had given a certain photo a Like, or when a specific user had visited a certain location. The tool was largely unknown to average users, but it was very useful to researchers. They used it, for example, to find out where air strikes were taking place in Yemen. With the Graph Search API, URLs with the correct search terms could be created. Researchers often built their own tools around this, such as StalkScan.

Facebook tells Vice it wants to “focus more on improving keyword search,” the default search feature in Facebook. The social medium wants to focus more on privacy in the future. The company has also been trying for some time to prevent companies from using automatic tools to request user data on a large scale, as happened during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Perhaps stopping Graph Search has something to do with that as well.

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