14 ms·
Who Does Facebook Think You Are Searching For?
- DarkMeld 15y agoI just noticed how incredibly fast Facebook search is
- melvinmt 15y agoIt's not that fast, Facebook actually starts the search query from the second letter (about 174 ms), before that, it uses the prefetched cache of first degree friends and apps.
- markmccraw 15y agoI'm curious whether these numbers factor in people who are looking for you/interacting with your profile. My list has some people I don't recognize as well people who I definitely have not clicked anything of recently, which is why it might.
- AVeljko 15y agoI am wondering this too, there are many people in that list which I am not friends with and have only visited their profile once, yet they have a higher score than some of my really close friends.
- markmccraw 15y agoWell I changed my privacy settings to visible to all, made a dummy account and click raped my profile and my dummy account didn't show up. I'll add the accounts as friends and then make note of the number, then do clicking from the dummy and see if it changes. There could be some privacy implications behind the initial coolness of this. Also, if you make an account and do nothing your value for yourself is 0.939565, which I guess is some sort of baseline of 0 interaction? Although I don't understand how they are modeling your interaction with yourself, tbh.
- markmccraw 15y agoIt seems like there is a lag time between clicking stuff and the value changing, because I'm not getting my dummy to show up at all.
- jcitme 15y ago...It logs what YOU view, not who views you...
- jefft22 15y agoPart of the algorithm may involve them trying to predict who you will want to add as a friend. People that attended the same events as you, people who have recently added your friends as friends, stuff like that.
- wtracy 15y agoThe bottom half of my list consists entirely of people who I didn't recognize at all. All but one of the ones I looked at have at least one mutual friend with me. (Now I'm curious whether Facebook generates some of these entries just by crawling my social graph?) Also, can anyone share what range of numbers they're seeing? At the very top of my list is one negative number. Beyond that, the top half of my list ranges between 0.1 and 1.0. The last half of the list ranges from 1.0 to 1.2.
- markmccraw 15y agoTop of my list is -3.7312181, bottom is 1.237559. 11 negative numbers, 108 positive. A friends was skewed more to negative numbers, so I'm guessing that maybe you just aren't a heavy/frequent user?
- mikeklaas 15y agoThe score is probably a measure of mutual information (or some other kind of log prob). That's what usually produces scores distributed like this.
- follownicholas 15y agoI also thought that other people's interactions with me are a part of the algorithm for this same reason. However, the reply by Keith Adams seems to suggest that is not the case, and that they are just "machine generated guesses" which weigh into the algorithm.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sebastianavina 15y agothat's a damn bad design. I stared at my laptop for a while to a bunch of hats?
- jeffool 15y agoI get why the parent was downvoted; it's not relevant to the topic. That said, when you open a page and all you see is the header and the article title? I think it's perfectly valid to comment on the design, or lack thereof, of the page. Seriously, the article was a worthwhile read, but I don't see how you can NOT comment on the design.
- hussong 15y agoMaybe it's the image requests that just made the server fall over.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jefft22 15y agoWould it be possible for somebody to create a virus that would grab this file and publish it to people's profiles? I think I'd crawl into a hole and die if my ex girlfriend discovered how highly she ranked...
- artvandelay 15y agoI've been waiting for the day when something is breached and you can see who's viewed your profile...all hell will break loose
- dstein 15y agoI'm kind of sadistically hoping Anonymous comes through on their promise and starts some kind of Facebook apocalypse like that.
- jefft22 15y agoWhat Anonymous should do is claim they are ready to do this and give everybody a couple days notice to remove their accounts before the hit. lulz would ensue if they could get the media worked up, which I bet wouldn't be that hard to do.
- markmccraw 15y agoit seems like it has happened very briefly, http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2009/12/facebook-app-uses-exploit-to-allow-users-to-see-who-visits-their-profile-screenshots/ http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2009/12/facebook-app-uses-exploit...
- anymoonus 15y agoThat would require the virus to successfully log in as you, and at that point does it matter?
- seagaia 15y agoWell, this script/data now has the increased effect of being very socially detrimental. It would be absolutely awkward as hell if data like this came out to friends.
- svsaraf 15y agoAs some have mentioned, doing a couple of tests with dummy accounts seems to indicate that a friend visiting your page can influence your first_degree.php, which would explain why there are a few people who you never stalk who happen to be on your list.
- follownicholas 15y agoThat's a possibility. The post that Keith Adams made however refutes this, but it is still possible that he is wrong/mistaken or that the first_degree.php was changed after he left Facebook.
- svsaraf 15y agoI should have been more clear. Keith seems to indicate that views from other users don't affect your first_degree.php. I disagree, here was my process: I built a dummy account in incognito that is friends with with my regularly used profile (A) and a profile owned by a friend of mine (B). All friend requests were made from A & B TO the dummy. I then checked the first_degree.php of the dummy, as expected, me and my friend were first. Perhaps not surprisingly, the next people on the list were the intersection of A & B 's friend lists. Now I logged back in to A, knowing that B wasn't searching for the dummy, and searched for the dummy a few times a day for a couple days (I learned about first_degree a couple weeks ago). Checking the dummy's first_degree showed that friends passed A & B had more of A's friends. My guess is that Keith is right in general. I might not be able to move myself up the ladder of the dummy, but I can change the Facebook Social Graph by changing my viewing behavior. The machine generated list uses that graph to determine first_degree. Even if it's indirect, it means first_degree can be influenced by searches of others. Or I'm wrong!
- impendia 15y agoOut of my top ten, seven are women I have had a crush on at some point. Seems they are on to something...
- manojlds 15y agoNot them, you :)
- modeless 15y agoBoy, this would be a great way to hijack Facebook accounts. Just convince a bunch of people to run your bookmarklet on their Facebook profile.
- kmavm 15y agoIndeed, it is not wise to run third-party bookmarklets while logged into Facebook. This one may be benign, but the next one may not be. If you want to see the JSON we're talking about, just load https://www.facebook.com/ajax/typeahead/search/first_degree.php?__a=1&filter=user&viewer=***userid***&token=&stale_ok=0 https://www.facebook.com/ajax/typeahead/search/first_degree.... with 'userid' replaced with your numeric Facebook account ID.
- danger 15y agoFor mine to display scores, I had to remove the "[0]" after "filter": https://www.facebook.com/ajax/typeahead/search/first_degree.php?__a=1&filter=user&viewer=***userid***&token=&stale_ok=0 https://www.facebook.com/ajax/typeahead/search/first_degree.... With the "filter[0]" in the url, all scores came back as 0 for me.
- kmavm 15y agoThanks, edited accordingly.
- raptrex 15y agohow do you find your numberic facebok ID?
- irahul 15y agoIf your fb id is raptrex, https://graph.facebook.com/raptrex https://graph.facebook.com/raptrex There might be another way, but this is the one I use.
- Sniffnoy 15y agoI just keep getting errors. Viewer is also supposed to be replaced with the numeric ID, right?
- kmavm 15y agoHi, my name is Keith Adams, and I worked on Facebook's typeahead. The system has evolved a bit since we launched, but I talked about first_degree.php in the tech talk we did about the typeahead back-end last year: https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=432864835468 https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=432864835468 Briefly, first_degree.php returns objects you're directly connected to in the graph, and if there's space a few machine-generated guesses at other good results. We preload these as soon as you focus the "Search" box at the top of the page, in the hopes of having some decent results to show when you start typing. The index field does, as the article inferred, represent our best guess at a ranking function on these first degree objects. The inputs to this ranking function explicitly do not include other users' behavior on the site. I talked a bit about our ranking function in this quora question: http://www.quora.com/How-does-the-new-Facebook-search-engine-know-what-Im-thinking/answer/Keith-Adams http://www.quora.com/How-does-the-new-Facebook-search-engine... Edit: To clarify what a lot of people seem to be wondering, visiting someone's profile does not affect the search results of anyone but yourself.
- coryl 15y agoCan other people's interaction on your Facebook user affect their ranking on your list?
- davedx 15y ago"The inputs to this ranking function explicitly do not include other users' behavior on the site"
- AmericanOP 15y agoKeith, I would like a feature to clear my facebook search history/profile view history. I consider it a privacy issue. The knowledge that anyone who stumbles across my logged-in profile can see who I'm interested in by experimenting in my friend search bar has a chilling effect on the profiles I view. Google and most browsers have a 'clear search history' feature- it would be nice if facebook had the same.
- 15y ago
- kirillzubovsky 15y agoTried browsing through the javascript to see if you're screwing with me somehow ... got too lazy 1/3 way through and decided to trust that as a member of HN community you wouldn't (probably a terrible idea). But yea, the script works ... all too well.
- jonah 15y agoYou can always just use the inspector in your browser to view the original JSON and run it through JSLINT to make it readable. No external script needed. ;)
- kirillzubovsky 15y agoYea, I ended up doing it afterward, to take a deeper look into the date. tnx!
- sakopov 15y agoNot knowing much about facebook API, tried plugging in somebody else's profile ID instead of "Env.User". Thank God it came back with "not authorized."
- seagaia 15y ago1. This is very cool 2. This is very scary. Someone hacking me then posting the top 10? Social disaster
- jrockway 15y agoWhy? I don't use Facebook, but visiting people's profiles on social sites doesn't mean much on the other ones. Most of the people I look at on Twitter or Google+ have done something so brazenly spammish that I have to go to their profile to find the "report spam" link or whatever. These people aren't my friends, they're just people that spam me that I want to go away. Hardly a social disaster.
- ShardPhoenix 15y agoYou realize he wasn't talking about you, right?
- seagaia 15y agoWell, imagine if you will you were stalking some person you kind of know but not very well, or someone who is an ex-whatever, etc...and that info gets out, and they know. It could spell disaster. Sure, it's entirely the person's fault for stalking in the first place, but the internet enables that so...
- pclark 15y agoLooked at mine. First thought: whoa, I hope no one else ever sees this Facebook you scary.
- tuhin 15y agoMy list is all random. The first entry is my girlfriend, the next though is a random girl from college whose profile I have hardly visited more than say 4-5 times ever on Facebook. Same for others down the list. So is it something were people are apparently assuming that it is onto something because they can see those 2 names they do not want anyone to know about among the 10 being in the top or is the result for everyone actually correct? In the case of the latter how is it so random for me? I have Michael Arrington on the top 15 and I swear I do not stalk his profile.
- bauserdotcom 15y agoFacebook's reps haven't said the list is based on just on profiles you view, they said it's based on "people you interact with" -- there may be other stuff in there, like messaging activity, or commenting, or liking. Even if you don't go directly to Arrington's profile, you can be interacting with him in the newsfeed.
- mrmaddog 15y agoI would think that clicking on links that a person posts is a good signal and thus would increase your engagement number. Other signals that probably feed into this are pictures you look at, likes, comments, groups you are in common with, etc. i.e. anything that ties you to another person, though I bet they are all weighted differently.
- bilalhusain 15y agoThose who don't want to run the script can visit the facebook first_degree page[1], search for "path" in the output. Note that you need to replace your facebook id in the link which can be obtained via graph api [2]. [1] http://www.facebook.com/ajax/typeahead/search/first_degree.php?__a=1&filter[0]=user&viewer={your_facebook_id} http://www.facebook.com/ajax/typeahead/search/first_degree.p... [2] http://graph.facebook.com/{your_vanity_name} http://graph.facebook.com/{your_vanity_name}
- bryanh 15y agoLuckily as I read this (and my significant other read it over my shoulder) all my top matches are close male friends and my brother (and her). Seriously though, this is a bit on the creepy side Facebook.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- nabaraj 15y agoTime to run this script on my crush's profile to see if I am on her top of list or not.
- javert 15y agoDoesn't work unless you are logged in as that person. (I tried, just to make sure.)
- follownicholas 15y agoThat's why you have to hack into their account first :-) (kidding)
- PurplePanda 15y agois facebook censoring this? i tried to post the link to the thekeesh.com page to a friends 'wall' and everything in my comment after and including the link was elided. Or maybe facebook post entries are always that broken.
- bauserdotcom 15y agoI don't think they're censoring it -- The HTML on this page makes heavy use of the TABLE and SPAN elements for formatting. That seems to be something that makes it difficult for Facebook's link-grabber to read pages. I've encountered the same problem posting links to other sites with idiosyncratic HTML.
- frommers 15y agoTechCrunch now has a post on it so you can definitely post a link to TC
- NnamdiJr 15y agoI think it's a bit funny that with a score of -0.3 I am #2 on my own list (#1 being a girl who's profile I checkout a bit too often), I'm stalking myself?? That said, I've always thought it was strange how FB comes up with the people not only in search but also the ten friends list on the left in profiles, the chat list on the right, and 'people you may know'. I've done a few tests w/ friends regarding the topic, and pretty much what everyone here has guessed seems to be true. There's a very good chance FB factors in people who are looking for you/interacting with your profile (unreciprocated), but of course they won't admit that.. I don't think it's such a big deal in either case. The top Chinese Facebook-like SNS site, http://renren.com/ http://renren.com/, shows everyone the most recent 9 visitors on a page, and its often used (by would-be stalkers) as a way to overtly show interest "hey, i'm checking you out" kinda deal, or for couples to let each other know they are attentive. Otherwise, its just friends keeping tabs on each other. I'll admit, at first I was weirded out by it, but now it seems almost normal. I'm probably way out of the norm here, but I honestly wouldn't mind having this in FB.
- pharrington 15y agoPretty much exactly what I was going to say about this (I'm #3 on my list). I just posted the article and my top 10 on my wall, tagging everyone in it. Curious as to what the non HN crowd thinks.
- bauserdotcom 15y agoGreat. You're probably going to be Ground Zero for next week's version of the "run this program to see who looks at your profile" rumor, and the week-after-next's bogus virus warning about running the script.
- AdamTReineke 15y agoHere's how the top 209 people in the list rank for me (the whole list was too long for me to bother cleaning up at 1:30am). 22 people had rankings of less than zero. http://i.imgur.com/WqcKF.png http://i.imgur.com/WqcKF.png
- user24 15y agoHere's a graph of my entire list, annotated with "I don't know this person" and "This person is invited to my wedding". http://i.imgur.com/zd2Ts.png http://i.imgur.com/zd2Ts.png Top ten: 1) best man 2) random person who lives in my apartment blocked who I stalked once to get their mail to them 3) Wife-to-be 4) Her sister 5) Good friend of mine from Uni 6) Me 7) Place my wife-to-be volunteers at 8) Another friend from uni 9) Wife-to-be's best friend 10) Someone I know online but not IRL.
- oe 15y agoThe bookmarklet doesn't work if you have secure browsing (https) enabled on Facebook. As you should.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
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- erikb 15y agoThat is really strange to me. Maybe I don't stalk enough or something, but often when I look up a friend (someone who is actually in my friend list and I communicate often with) it seems to be impossible for Facebook to find this guy and I have to go directly to the friendlist search to get this person's profile. Always (or so often that I don't remember the exceptions, which is in usability terms "always") when I use the normal search bar I get people I don't know, have not even indirect relations with or be in any way interested in. Sometimes the names don't even consist of the words I was putting in the search bar. That's why I really wonder why people can think of facebook's people search as something cool or "stealable".
- mrspeaker 15y agoThis is pretty funny in the ajax code: success: function(result) { alert('Please try again.'); }, error: function(data) { var text = data.responseText; // ... processes the data here... } Why is success error and error success?
- albertsun 15y agoI think because the request is asking for content type JSON but the Facebook response comes back as javascript with a for (;;); at the beginning. The content types don't match so jQuery invokes the error callback.
- chad_oliver 15y agoFacebook rape (posting embarrassing statements when using a friend's account) is common. What happens when facebook rape becomes "post who your friend has a crush on"?
- ristretto 15y agoFacebook excels at making sensational frontpages with pretty vanilla technology.
- fecaldog 15y agoI might be one of the few here who has a facebook account with 0 friends and never really use it. So the results are very interesting as they contain people who I know but do not interact with. Some of them must be from profile searches I have performed but I cannot explain the others. I am inclined to believe they must be incorporating 'other users behavior on the site'.
- 46284 15y agoMy roommate is infatuated with this girl he's known since HS. I just ran it on his laptop and she's at -68. Everybody else is above -4. Can anybody beat that?
- mleonhard 15y agoIf you have folks with non-ASCII names, here's a Python three-liner to convert the output of first_degree.php to a text file: with open("first_degree.php.txt", "w") as f: for e in json.loads(open("first_degree.php.json","rb").read().replace("for (;;);",""))["payload"]["entries"]: f.write(("%s %r\n" % (e['text'],-e['index'])).encode('utf-8'))
- follownicholas 15y agoI'm not a frequent Facebook user but I log in at least once a day. The first person on my list is a girl I am dating who is about a -2. I am the second person on my list also at about -2. About 30 more people have a negative number. The remaining people (about 500) are all a positive number. I don't even know who many of the people are at the bottom of my list. It is interesting to note however that my brother is a frequent Facebook user and his first person on his list ranks at about a -26, and EVERY SINGLE person in his graph is assigned a negative number. Despite this, he still doesn't know who a lot of the people are on the bottom of his list. Other things I noticed: - Some people that I barely even know but just became friends with are ranking highly on my list. I imagine this is because I probably viewed a bunch of their pictures after being friends, combined with the fact that I don't often view profiles of people I am friends with. - Some of my more recently added friends have the same exact value. I wonder how much information could be extracted about the algorithm by creating a dummy community of people and connecting them together, then recording the results. I imagine much of the algorithm could be reverse engineered by this if anybody were up to the task. I will probably work on it if nobody else does and publish my findings. EDIT: Explained what I was trying to say better, fixed grammar.
- jkeesh 15y agoThanks for all the comments and feedback on the bookmarklet. Glad it was entertaining. As mentioned by other commenters, the popularity of something like this does raise many interesting security issues.