How to Find Information in Facebook
Facebook users very often have a need to find some photo of video files. For instance, how to find images of the Kyiv center during Euromaidan?
First of all let’s have a look at Graph Search. This is a quite powerful search engine operating with special commands in the form of questions in English.
Facebook search is more appropriate for personal ends – to find people with common interests, restaurants, old photos, videos that you liked etc. However, when placing correctly formulated questions, you could quickly find and verify required information for journalistic purposes.
Several tips about Graph Search:
1.Graph Search operates only with English interface of Facebook (the system is on the stage of developing and that’s why it does not work with other languages).
2. You could not find information from specific date, only for a month or a year. That means that you won’t be able to find photos from, for instance, August 24, 2015.
3. Facebook users have a possibility to hide their posts from the search. More details about privacy are here.
4. The first results of the search will be from those persons that you contacted most, that is your friends, then from mutual friends, after that from all the rest.
5. Search results can be sorted by many parameters.
Search for video/photo
You should use an operator videos, then add taken in/taken at/of/at, location/person and a time frame (selectively). Here are several examples:
- videos taken in maidan nezalezhnosti from november 2013 to february 2014
- videos taken at Donetsk International Airport from 2014
The same principle is used when searching for photos, only with an operator photos.
- photos taken in Kharkov, Freedom Square from September 2014
- photos taken at Maidan Nezalezhnosti from November 2013 to February 2014
It is important to pay special attention to specifying location, as different users can differently tag the same place. For example, requests photos taken at Maidan Nezalezhnosti from january 2014 and photos taken at Київ, Майдан from january 2014 will produce different results.
If you don’t know how to spell a geographical feature, you could use Facebook hints. On your page you have to chooseCheck in in the Update Status field. After you enter the beginning of the word Facebook will propose its variants.
Possible problems
Sometimes unpredictable problems appear when working with Graph Search. It is not known yet when these bugs are to be fixed.
- Search results could differ on different days, as reported by users.
- Sometimes when you enter several parameters Facebook could produce no results.
- Cyrillic alphabet could cause corrupted or empty results.
