Facebook’s Graph Search allows you to create very sophisticated, relational searches through the information people share about themselves on Facebook.

In the latest edition of The Cybersleuth's Guide to the Internet, we discuss recent changes Facebook’s Graph Search. Many of our most useful investigative-type Graph Search searches stopped returning results in late 2016.

For example, it had been possible to enter the following search in Facebook's search box:

People named Kirby who work at John Deere

It would retrieve a list of Facebook users with either the first or last name of Kirby who indicated in their profiles that they worked at John Deere.

While it is still possible to retrieve Graph Search results from the Facebook search box, Facebook has changed some of the search syntax used to form those searches. Now, to retrieve similar results to the sample search (above), we must enter the following search in Facebook's search box:

People who work at John Deere named Kirby

This subtle difference in word order is the difference between useful results and no results at all.

You can also create your own Graph Searches by forming them in the address bar of your browser using Facebook’s Graph Search’s search syntax and search parameters. Searches are formatted this way:

http://www.facebook.com/search/[USERID]/[PARAMETER].

The subject’s USERID must be the user’s numeric profile id and not their custom, vanity URL (if the user created one). See page 338 of The Cybersleuth's Guide to the Internet for more information on identifying Facebook profile user IDs.

For example, we can search for photos taken at a particular business (El Pinto Restaurant in Albuquerque, NM) like this:

https://www.facebook.com/search/52188973194/photos-of

That search will show us all of the photos tagged as being taken at 52188973194, which is the numeric profile-ID of El Pinto Restaurant in Albuquerque, NM. It doesn’t matter who took them, or when. As long as they are publicly available to be viewed on Facebook, this search will retrieve them.

We can also narrow that search down to a particular month like this:

https://www.facebook.com/search/52188973194/photos-of/2016/oct/date-2/photos/intersect.

This search returns only those photos of tagged with El Pinto’s User ID, posted in October 2016. If we wanted a list of Facebook users who reported working at El Pinto, we could perform this search:

https://www.facebook.com/search/52188973194/employees.

Or we can search for all locations where your target checked in, like this:

https://www.facebook.com/search/650396649/places-visited/.

Note that all of the parameters must be lowercase.

We have assembled the following list available parameters:

Find Users or Pages by Name

• /pages-named/
• /users-named/

Find Users Based on Places They've Visited, etc.

• /events-at/
• /events-near/
• /home-residents/
• /pages-in/
• /photos-in/
• /places-checked-in/
• /places-in/
• /places-named/
• /places-near/
• /places-reviewed/
• /places-visited/
• /recent-places-visited/
• /residents/
• /reviews-at/
• /stories-at/
• /users-birth-place/
• /visitors/

Find Photos

• /photos-by/
• /photos-commented/
• /photos-in/
• /photos-interacted/
• /photos-interested/
• /photos-keyword/
• /photos-liked/
• /photos-of/
• /photos-recommended-for/
• /photos-tagged/
• /photos-uploaded/
• /recent-photos/

Find Posts

• /hashtag/
• /reshare-stories-by/
• /reviews-at/
• /stories-by/
• /stories-in/
• /stories-liked/
• /stories-media-tagged/
• /stories-news/
• /stories-publishers/
• /stories-recent/
• /stories-tagged/
• /stories-topic/

Filter by Date/Relative Time

• /after/
• /before/
• /before/ /after/
• /last-month/
• /last-week/
• /last-year/
• /recent/
• /this-month/
• /this-week/
• /this-year/
• /today/
• /YEAR/ (four digit)
• /yesterday/