Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Understanding Facebook Privacy and Facebook Search

As you're writing your search queries, It's important to understand a little about how Facebook privacy settings work with search. Keep in mind that every query you make depends on people making their status updates, links, and other items on their news feeds available to the world.

Unfortunately, that isn't the default on Facebook.

So, while you'll still get a lot of updates from a basic Graph API search, it will only be a minute portion of all the updates on Facebook that actually match your search terms. As of this writing, the only way to search more private status updates is to use FQL, obtain read_stream permission from that user, and know the users whose feeds you're trying to search through. When you do that, use Facebook's real-time APIs to deliver your new updates from those users, and query each update in your own code to see whether the update matches what you're looking for.

Beyond that, you're stuck with public updates to respect the privacy of Facebook users. That can still have its uses, though, and I think you can find some creative ways to approach it.