What's wrong with Facebook's search at the moment?

Professional researchers are used to the unpredictable nature of Facebook's search policy. They started off with a really simple search. You could only find people by school, town and employer. Then suddenly we were treated to the amazing, wonderful, super-flexible dream that was Facebook Graph search.

Sadly Facebook killed Graph without any forewarning and introduced a new search tool with subject tags, which aimed to give people more relevant, more local search results. The switch over seemed hurried, like they were beta testing it on the public. That was at the end of 2014 and it's still not working properly. Facebook helpfully left Graph running on their system for those of us that could work out the web addresses of searches we wanted. Failing that, we could always search Facebook via Google.

With these four search options, we have struggled on successfully until around July 3rd 2017, when the system changed, again, without warning.

Dreadful results for a simple search for people for live in India

The current state of play finds the search producing terrible search results for simple searches (results riddled with a mixture friends of friends and porn spam accounts) and total inability to do more complex searches in the box.

More complex intersected searches that used to work directly from the search box are now producing results

Researchers could have previously lived with these calamities, as using ID numbers and commands in specially formulated web addresses bypassed the problem and to us directly to results from the old Facebook Graph search.

This is still running. Sort of. Sadly it only gives you a handful of results and gives priority to friends, friends of friends and other connections in the search results. Not every useful. My Graph search for  people who live in Liverpool and like the Beatles only gave me nine results. You may find more, it depends on your account. It's an unpredictable lottery - the last thing a professional researcher wants.

Since this system used to work beautifully, it is a mystery as to why Facebook can't just roll back the current dysfunctional system to the previous Graph search. Perhaps it's incompatible to the tab system or perhaps internal politics are getting in the way. I suggest giving a free hand to the search nerds to get it right again, as soon as possible.