Transcription
Hello friend. You have probably heard that there is a social network called Facebook. Many people often hate it, and in most cases, absolutely deservedly. But this does not negate the fact that there are more than a hell of a lot of users there. Both ordinary people and organizations, institutions, and other associations of citizens have their own pages there. Moreover, some even manage to actively maintain their pages. And this, in turn, means exactly that there is a lot of information there, a lot of it, and it can be found and used for your own purposes. This is exactly what we will do today. But first, a few organizational matters. While I was preparing this video, YouTube, for some reason, deleted the video about Instagram, writing that it is harmful and dangerous content. I didn't quite understand what was harmful and dangerous in autumn, but that's that. The article on the website is still available; YouTube can't get there, thankfully. In general, this will not affect anything. I will continue to make videos for you anyway, but things like this negatively affect motivation. Also, it negatively affects that 70 percent of those who watched my videos watch them without subscribing. So, please make an effort to click the subscribe button. It's not difficult for you, but it will be pleasant for me. Well, you can also support the channel financially via the links in the description. This will also add motivation to do more and better. And now, let's move on to the topic of our video. Working with Facebook from a syntactical point of view should be divided into two areas: information search and working with user profiles. By information search, we mean collecting non-personalized data, for example, about some event. Working with profiles is when we collect information about a specific person or organization. In practice, this division will be very conditional because these areas will constantly intersect. But for studying the process and for more structured data, this division will be very useful. The main principle of information search is that before you look for something, you must answer the question of what you want to find. And understanding this, you look at what you already have and plan further steps leading to the result. And at this stage, you will already need some tools that will help you find the necessary information. Now, about the search itself. Let's start with the simplest things and gradually move to more complex and non-obvious ones. Facebook, and any social network, has its own search. It works, of course, so-so, but for some simple tasks, it's enough. Moreover, in most cases, it's worth starting with it for collecting some initial information. When it is obtained, or not obtained, you can proceed to use some more sophisticated resources. The search allows you to find people, pages, posts, photos, videos, and so on. Each item has its own filters that allow you to specify the query. By the way, if these filters were made humanly and allowed normal settings, the need for most third-party tools would simply disappear. I see no point in dwelling on the internal search additionally, as everyone can open and see it. Facebook's internal search copes well when we know exactly what we are looking for, for example, a specific organization, its name, and type of activity that we know for sure, or information about an event that we know precisely. But if we don't have exact data to search by, Facebook's internal search will usually return anything but what is needed. And here, third-party tools will come in handy. But before proceeding to use any tools, you need to know a small and very simple technical nuance. Every page and even post on Facebook has an identifier. It's called Facebook ID. It's usually from 10 to 16 digits. Sometimes we can see it in the address bar. But if the user has verified the page by phone number, they can use a created name as the page address. But this is not a problem at all, as there are plenty of resources that allow you to find the Facebook ID of any page, for example, Luka. According to the idea, we insert the page and get the identifier. This way, you can find the ID of a person's or organization's page. But sometimes we may need the ID of a city or place, for example, to search using geolocation. To find it in Facebook search, you need to type the city name and open its page. It's usually the first in the list. In the page address, after the city name, there will be a numerical value. This is the Facebook ID of the city. Another way to find the ID is to do it manually from the browser. Press Ctrl+U to see the page code, then through search Ctrl+F, look for User ID. If you need to find pages, then PHD. And if you need to find groups, go to the page of the desired group and look for Group ID. When working with Facebook's internal search, this identifier doesn't give us much. But when we use third-party resources, it will be needed almost always. It will also be needed when we search through the address bar. Now let's consider more precise ways to search for information on Facebook. I remind you that all links will be on the website and in Telegram. For those who are not subscribed to Telegram, now is the time to subscribe. Let's start with the tool hooposted. This is an improved version of the internal search, but humanely designed. In section number 2, we can also get the Facebook ID. Section 3 is dedicated specifically to search and is divided into several groups. The first group is searching by keywords for a specific day, month, or year. The second is searching by keywords for a period of time; here you will need to specify the start and end dates for the information you need. The third is Location, which is searching by keywords relative to a place; here you will need to specify the ID of a specific place relative to which you are searching for information. The fourth group allows you to search for posts by a specific user; for this, enter the user's identifier in the User ID field. If you don't enter keywords in the keyword section, all posts of the specified user will be found. The next tool, graptips, has a slightly more expanded functionality, and therefore it is a bit complicated. First, we need to choose what exactly we will be looking for. It can be posts, people, photos, pages, places, videos, events, or most popular posts. In most cases, the usage algorithm will be the same. We will need to specify a filter depending on the object, then a date filter, and keywords. After that, click "Open URL." The Facebook page with the results you need will open in a new window. For example, in the section for searching photos, we can choose whose photos we are interested in, or photos from which place we need. You can also sort photos by the desired date range and enter keywords by which the search will be performed. All other sections work on the same principle. There's no need to dwell on each one; it's not difficult to figure out. By the way, on Intel X, the capabilities of both previous resources are combined in one place, so if you wish, you can use it there. Now, about profile analysis. In most cases, profile analysis involves its systematic and gradual study. We look at what the person writes, study photos, friends, comments. In general, we look for and save what will help us find the final information we are interested in. Usually, all this happens manually because very often the necessary information is on the surface, but sometimes there can be cases when you need to dig deeper. And here, to simplify the process, you should use third-party tools. For example, it happens that we found interesting comments under some post, or even a whole discussion, and we need not just to read it, although sometimes that's the case, but it would be desirable to save it. You can, of course, just screenshot it or copy the text itself, but working with it later will be unrealistic. So, here everything is as simple as possible. We insert the link to the desired post, and we can save the comments in the desired format, for example, a table, or view the table in the browser. Moreover, it will save not only the message but also the data of those who wrote it, including their Facebook ID. The free version saves only 100 comments, but usually, this is enough because if the person being studied is not particularly media-savvy, there are unlikely to be many comments under the posts. It happens that you need to download a video from Facebook. Then, we will also insert the link and download the video. There's not much to explain here; the process is simple and straightforward. Unfortunately, Facebook is an absolutely not user-friendly social network, and therefore, if something can be done in the most inconvenient way, it will definitely be on Facebook. And they are also very closed and greedy, and therefore they constantly try to do everything to complicate access to the network not through their applications. For this reason, there are practically no services for any kind of search. We have already gone through all the main, more or less adequate ones, but there is one more way to search on Facebook that users have invented. It's very complicated and very inconvenient, but it allows you to search for almost anything. This is search through URL modification. This is how, by the way, those search tools that we considered above work. I am very unsure that this method will be useful to many, so I will only go over the basic principles and the most useful templates that can be useful most often. But if you want to delve into and understand in detail, I will leave links to the full guide on the website and in Telegram. Unfortunately, at some point, I had to deal with this crap, and I'll be honest, I've seen very few such complicated stories, but now I can briefly explain the essence. First, for all this to work correctly, you need to translate your Facebook page interface to English. To do this, you need to select language and region in your profile settings and choose English there. The essence of the method is that in order to search for something, we must use a search URL. This URL will need to be edited depending on what we are looking for. First of all, you need to change the category value. Here you need to enter what type of information you are looking for. The list of categories is limited: top - search for the most popular content; post - search for messages; people - search for people; photos - search for photos; video - search for videos; pages - search for pages; and places - search for places. The next step is to edit the query value. Here you need to enter the keyword or keywords by which you will search. If there are several words, put a plus sign between them. For example, if we want to find the most popular publications on the topic of syntactics, it will look like this. Now you need to add a filter. It is added at the end after the equals sign. The filter is needed either for sorting the results or for selecting the desired results. To understand how it works, a filter is a string in JSON format that needs to be converted to Base64 encoding. For example, a filter meaning the latest. To convert to Base64, you need a converter. Any will do, but among the most useful is CyberChip. In the list on the left, by double-clicking, select the conversion method. In our case, Base64, it will appear in the recipe section. Then, in the Input window, insert what you will convert, and in the output window, you will get the desired result. Now we can assemble our search query into one whole. After the equals sign, add the resulting code, and to get the result, go to the resulting link. If it seemed to you that this is complicated, wait, this was a simple example to understand how it all works. In reality, the filter itself, before converting, may also need to be edited, and moreover, sometimes filters also need to be combined. There are quite a few of these filters, but in the article on the website, I have listed the most relevant filters that may be useful to you, and for convenience, I have divided them by category. Now let's look at a more detailed example of how it works, and to make it clearer, let's take an example where we need to combine filters to get a more precise result. Let's, for example, find a person named Alex who lives in Kyiv and works at BBC Ukraine. What do we need for this? First, let's edit the search string. We have specified the category People, as we are looking for a person, and as the query, we have entered the name Alex. Now we need to add filters. We will need a filter for location, which needs to be entered with the location ID. This means that first, we need to find the location in Facebook search by the query Kyiv. Find the city page and copy the ID from the address bar. Enter it into the location search filter. Now, in Facebook search, look for the BBC Ukraine page. Press Ctrl+U to see the source code and through Ctrl+F, look for paged. We enter it into the organization search filter. Now we need to combine these two strings, and here we need a little attention. For combining, we need to remove the last curly brace in the first filter and remove the first curly brace in the second filter, and in their place, add a comma. You can check the operability of the resulting JSON on this site. If you made a mistake somewhere, it will show you where the error is. The most common errors are spaces or the use of angled quotes. The quotes should be straight. Now we need to convert the resulting JSON to Base64. Let's do it on CyberChip. As a result, we get the desired filter in Base64 encoding, which we will add to our query. Insert the resulting query into the address bar and see the result. The desired person is found. When combining filters, you need to consider that you can only combine filters from the same category. That is, for example, a filter from the People category can only be combined with filters from the same category. You cannot combine People with Top or others. It will show an empty page. And yes, I understand that this search method is a complicated story, but such is the nature of Facebook, and we can only work with what we have. And one more situational, but sometimes useful tool. On Facebook, you can search for advertisements and view data about them. To do this, go to the Ads Library website and select the country for which you are interested in advertisements. Then enter the keywords by which you will search. Wait a bit, and you will see the total number of results found and a list of found advertising messages. You can additionally apply filters to this list. You can choose the language of the ad, the advertiser, the platform, the date range, and so on. In the list of ads, we see the ad post itself, who posted it, a link to their Facebook, and the date when the ad was launched. You can click on each post and see more detailed information about the advertiser. When viewing complete information about a post, you can click "See All," and then we will see all the advertising posts of this author. And in the "About" tab, you can see when the page was created, as well as other related pages, and information about the advertised profiles. What are the advantages? This thing with searching for advertising messages can be very useful when identifying connections between commercial structures, or when you need, for example, to identify a bot farm. In general, in all those situations when you need to draw parallels between different pages, because often advertisements for different pages are paid for from the same account. And as a bonus, we see the connection between Facebook and Instagram accounts, which is also sometimes useful. Well, we can finish here. As you can see, searching on Facebook is not the most convenient or pleasant procedure. And there's nothing overly complicated about it. As everywhere, practice is key. And with you, as always, was Puls. Subscribe to the channel and see you next time.