Open Facebook Search - Search Facebook public timeline outside Facebook
Facebook launched their new open Graph API last week, and most of the attention has been towards how Facebook will be gathering massive amounts of new data through Social Plugins and how they are going to utilize it.
A very interesting thing also was launched at the same time, namely the Open Graph API. What developers and users have not quite realized yet is, that now there is a way to search the public timeline of Facebook, without logging in to Facebook.
This opens up whole new possibilities for developers to create totally new services on top of Facebook’s data. The first service to utilize this was likebutton.me, and while i was using it, I realized that they had managed to create a way to search these public records.
I though this idea could be taken further, so for the past day I’ve been working really hard (It’s not that hard really, but I’m not a fast coder) to create the first search engine for Facebook’s public timeline - Open Facebook Search.
The service is still quite much in beta, but I wanted to launch it to the world as quickly as possible. So, take a look at the brand new service: Open Facebook Search.
UPDATE: The site has gotten some nice coverage on Inside Facebook & ReadWriteWeb
UPDATE: Now you can embed all searches to any website. Read more.
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Comments
Date: April 27, 2010 | Time: 2:07 pm
This is cool! When you click on the search button, it takes some time to generate results so may be add “searching” text to it.
Date: April 27, 2010 | Time: 9:43 pm
Very cool indeed, I was waiting for this to pop up - actually thought about pinging you about the idea earlier.
Date: April 30, 2010 | Time: 6:54 pm
Very cool. How about a RSS feed of the results?
Date: April 30, 2010 | Time: 8:17 pm
Jani, that’s fixed.
Aaron, RSS-feeds are coming at some point.
Date: May 1, 2010 | Time: 12:02 am
A similar service is “Kurrently” at http://www.kurrently.com, which searches both Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, Kurrently’s results can flow in continuously, allowing users to keep tabs on live events.
Date: June 16, 2010 | Time: 12:46 pm
Great work there, would be nice if i could integrate this into my igoogle alerts, though.
Date: June 21, 2010 | Time: 3:04 am
Timo
I’ve being wondering, what is the search syntax you can use with this? For example can you include the OR operator? wildcards?
As far as I can tell, the OR operator doesn’t work or at least isn’t built-in at least for your service (as well as similar services).
Date: June 21, 2010 | Time: 9:38 am
Aaron,
The OR operator does not work as it is not supported by Facebook’s Graph API. Same thing with wildcards.
You can use double quotes (”") to search for exact queries.
Date: June 21, 2010 | Time: 4:33 pm
Timo
Thanks, that is what I feared. I wonder if you can do some sort of post query processing?
Without OR operator , it’s really tiresome.
Date: August 12, 2010 | Time: 11:57 pm
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