5 ms·

Why is this even news? Facebook has been crawling links for ages every time you post on the site. The crawler is how the link you paste gets a title, descriptio

Why is this even news? Facebook has been crawling links for ages every time you post on the site. The crawler is how the link you paste gets a title, description, and sometimes a thumbnail.

TannerLD 14y ago
"What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
- lostlogin 14y ago
  Wow I'm sick of people posting claims of off topic. And wow it's funny that someone has the patience to reply with the posting rules.
mars 14y ago
+1. not sure how a post like this can make it to the front page.
- whalesalad 14y ago
  There was a period where Hacker News consisted primarily of people on the right-hand side of the spectrum. People who were working inside of startups or had lots of experience with the web and our industry. Pretty much everyone knew what sharding was, and MongoDB wan't very popular. These days we've got a lot more people and they show up all across the board. Clearly if this is on the homepage, it was voted there by your peers. This kind of knowledge is completely obvious to many of us, but not everyone is on your level. Cut 'em some slack.
  - omarchowdhury 14y ago
    Even so, for those who are up to that point, that headline could give the implication that Facebook is getting into the search business.
    - jacquesm 14y ago
      That's why you should read the articles and not just the headlines. Headlines more often than not give a wrong impression.
  - mars 14y ago
    i'm just not so sure if the direction this is heading to is good. and also the headline of that article is miserable (as omarchowdhury already pointed out).
- egfx 14y ago
  Hmm, I thought people mainly knew about this. But I researched this a lot while making http://2fb.me http://2fb.me and actually witnessed this myself with google docs but didn't think twice about it. I'm sure the same thought was going through the heads of everybody reading this that knew anything about how the Facebook sharer worked. For those that found this news, it's beneficial to put open graph meta tags on your pages to control the crawler and you can also invoke the crawler (http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug) when your page changes before Facebook updates it automatically every 2 weeks or so.
k3n 14y ago
Do note, and I'm not sure if this differs from what you're referring to, but that the link was never even posted to the site; rather, it was placed into a chat box but never sent. Small difference but I think it's an interesting point. > To my bemusement, not only was the friend I was messaging away, I also hadn't even sent the link; I pasted it into the chat window but forgot to hit enter.
- cddotdotslash 14y ago
  You're right, but it also happens when you paste in the status button before hitting "Post." Try this: go to Facebook, post a link in your status box. Wait a few seconds. Notice that it will populate the link information fields even before you submit the post. It has to get that info from somewhere. That's where the crawler comes in.
  - k3n 14y ago
    Yeah that's expected, but it's not expected (at least for me) to happen in a chat. But, I never use FB chat so I don't know -- does it also create thumbnails for links and such?
    - cddotdotslash 14y ago
      Hmm, I see what you're saying; no it doesn't appear to create the thumbnail in chat. It would be interesting if Facebook uses different crawlers depending on whether the link is posted in the status box or in a chat. That could lead to some interesting analytics such as "your website was chatted about x number of times and shared via a status update x times."

Why is this even news? Facebook has been crawling links for ages every time you post on the site. The crawler is how the link you paste gets a title, description, and sometimes a thumbnail.

TannerLD 14y ago

"What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

lostlogin 14y ago
Wow I'm sick of people posting claims of off topic. And wow it's funny that someone has the patience to reply with the posting rules.

mars 14y ago

+1. not sure how a post like this can make it to the front page.

whalesalad 14y ago
There was a period where Hacker News consisted primarily of people on the right-hand side of the spectrum. People who were working inside of startups or had lots of experience with the web and our industry. Pretty much everyone knew what sharding was, and MongoDB wan't very popular. These days we've got a lot more people and they show up all across the board. Clearly if this is on the homepage, it was voted there by your peers. This kind of knowledge is completely obvious to many of us, but not everyone is on your level. Cut 'em some slack.
- omarchowdhury 14y ago
  Even so, for those who are up to that point, that headline could give the implication that Facebook is getting into the search business.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    That's why you should read the articles and not just the headlines. Headlines more often than not give a wrong impression.
- mars 14y ago
  i'm just not so sure if the direction this is heading to is good. and also the headline of that article is miserable (as omarchowdhury already pointed out).
egfx 14y ago
Hmm, I thought people mainly knew about this. But I researched this a lot while making http://2fb.me http://2fb.me and actually witnessed this myself with google docs but didn't think twice about it. I'm sure the same thought was going through the heads of everybody reading this that knew anything about how the Facebook sharer worked. For those that found this news, it's beneficial to put open graph meta tags on your pages to control the crawler and you can also invoke the crawler (http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug) when your page changes before Facebook updates it automatically every 2 weeks or so.

k3n 14y ago

Do note, and I'm not sure if this differs from what you're referring to, but that the link was never even posted to the site; rather, it was placed into a chat box but never sent. Small difference but I think it's an interesting point. > To my bemusement, not only was the friend I was messaging away, I also hadn't even sent the link; I pasted it into the chat window but forgot to hit enter.

cddotdotslash 14y ago
You're right, but it also happens when you paste in the status button before hitting "Post." Try this: go to Facebook, post a link in your status box. Wait a few seconds. Notice that it will populate the link information fields even before you submit the post. It has to get that info from somewhere. That's where the crawler comes in.
- k3n 14y ago
  Yeah that's expected, but it's not expected (at least for me) to happen in a chat. But, I never use FB chat so I don't know -- does it also create thumbnails for links and such?
  - cddotdotslash 14y ago
    Hmm, I see what you're saying; no it doesn't appear to create the thumbnail in chat. It would be interesting if Facebook uses different crawlers depending on whether the link is posted in the status box or in a chat. That could lead to some interesting analytics such as "your website was chatted about x number of times and shared via a status update x times."