Does facebook have a public search API yet?

Solution 1:

You can use the Facebook graph API :

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/

look for the searching section,

QUOTE from fb:

Searching

You can search over all public objects in the social graph with https://graph.facebook.com/search. The format is:

https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=QUERY&type=OBJECT_TYPE We support search for the following types of objects:

All public posts: https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=watermelon&type=post

• People: https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=mark&type=user
• Pages: https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=platform&type=page
• Events: https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=conference&type=event
• Groups: https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=programming&type=group
• Places: https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=coffee&type=place&center=37.76,122.427&distance=1000
• Checkins: https://graph.facebook.com/search?type=checkin

You can also search an individual user's News Feed, restricted to that user's friends, by adding a q argument to the home connection URL:

• News Feed: https://graph.facebook.com/me/home?q=facebook

Solution 2:

Facebook Public Post search is no longer available in Graph API v2.0: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog

Solution 3:

Better way is using Facebook PHP SDK

-> Search any term using facebook php sdk.

$mySrch = $facebook->api('/search?q=YOUR WORD&type=TYPES');

THERE ARE VARIOUS TYPES, you can search:

1. post
2. user
3. event
4. group
5. place
6. checkin

Solution 4:

The search according to "type=user" type="event" type="group" type="page is deprecated now. See https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/changelog/breaking-changes#search-4-4