Chapter 12
Searching with Facebook's Search API
In This Chapter
- Searching with Graph API
- Deciphering search results
- Accessing search results via code
- Searching with FQL
Facebook is a new form of search engine optimization (SEO). The Web itself is being indexed by people, and It's becoming more and more important for Web sites to integrate the proper Open Graph tags and strategies necessary to rank high in search results on Facebook.com.
Right off the bat, every user has a big search box at the top of every Facebook Page on the site. Users can very quickly receive relevant pages, people, and status updates that are being sorted by what their friends are interested in, just by typing in a keyword or two.
Facebook also provides a tool for developers, marketers, and data analysts to see information that users are posting and sharing online. With privacy in mind, Facebook has given you access to every post and item in its database that users want you to see. You can access all of this through Facebook's Search API.
In this chapter, I talk about all the different ways you can access data from Facebook's database. You can use simple Graph API object calls (see Chapter 7) to access individual objects in the database. Or you can find many objects at once by making Search API requests (Search API is actually just a subset of Graph API), which I cover in the next section. Lastly, if Search API isn't returning what you need, you can use more advanced joins and FQL statements (see Chapter ...
Get Facebook® Application Development For Dummies® now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
