New Facebook ID numbers for pages?
For anyone who has been doing deep searches on Facebook, the ID number of a page is critical information. Recently, I’ve noticed that the employer and education pages IDs were not working in either the advanced search tools like SowSearch or the manual Base64 translation method. I have worked out the change and restored my search capabilities, but I would like to outline how this might be done for anyone should this happen in the future.
First, perform the search as you normally would do. My example will be looking for students named Brian who are attending or have attended Georgetown University. Note that I am choosing an easy-to-access example because restoring the capability requires this to be easily searchable in Facebook - meaning that it will definitely show up as a suggestion in the Facebook filters.
First, using the source code method of getting the ID number for the chosen Facebook page, I will search within the code for container_id and paste that after facebook.com/ in my browser to test that it is indeed the ID number I require. In this case, the ID number for the Georgetown University page on Facebook is 100064869785068. Using SowSearch, I select people in the dropdown menu and add this ID number into the “school” filter, remembering to click “add filter” and scrolling up if needed to double-check the filter has been added. Then I use the search term “Brian” and choose the center choice to open the URL in a new window.
SowSearch.info
This is where things go wrong. No results. Surely, there is someone named Brian on Facebook who has attended Georgetown University.
Zero results
Notice on the sidebar of Facebook that there are no filters added. This is the issue. So I manually added Georgetown University in the education search filter, and there are numerous Brians! So, are we stuck using only Facebook's suggestions for that field?
The Brians have been anonymized.
No. Let’s examine the differences in the web URLs for each result.
Our search with no results is https://www.facebook.com/search/people/?q=Brian&epa=FILTERS&filters=eyJzY2hvb2wiOiJ7XCJuYW1lXCI6XCJ1c2Vyc19zY2hvb2xcIixcImFyZ3NcIjpcIjEwMDA2NDg2OTc4NTA2OFwifSJ9
And the search with results is https://www.facebook.com/search/people?q=Brian&filters=eyJzY2hvb2w6MCI6IntcIm5hbWVcIjpcInVzZXJzX3NjaG9vbFwiLFwiYXJnc1wiOlwiODgyNTMzMTI0NVwifSJ9
Comparing just the filters:
eyJzY2hvb2wiOiJ7XCJuYW1lXCI6XCJ1c2Vyc19zY2hvb2xcIixcImFyZ3NcIjpcIjEwMDA2NDg2OTc4NTA2OFwifSJ9
eyJzY2hvb2w6MCI6IntcIm5hbWVcIjpcInVzZXJzX3NjaG9vbFwiLFwiYXJnc1wiOlwiODgyNTMzMTI0NVwifSJ9
They are clearly not the same. But we know both are Base64, so let’s decode using Base64Decode.org.
Our decoded original filter looks like this:
{"school":"{\"name\":\"users_school\",\"args\":\"100064869785068\"}"}
And the decoded working filter looks like this:
{"school:0":"{\"name\":\"users_school\",\"args\":\"8825331245\"}"}
The only difference appears to be the ID number. But what ID number is that? Testing it by using it after facebook.com brings us to… Georgetown University. Try is: https://www.facebook.com/8825331245
Both ID numbers go to the university's Facebook page. Why?
Going back to the source code for the page, searching for 8825331245 should help us identify how to get these secondary IDs.
Searching within the code, I determined that there were 14 times that the new ID showed up in the source code. Looking at the code before the ID number, there are a selection of possible search terms to use in the future, but they must be tested first to make sure they are in use across a number of pages. After testing a variety of business and fan pages across Facebook, I discovered that associated_page_id worked well (and is descriptive). Once I started using that ID number in both SowSearch and via the manual search method, I regained full search capability for those pages.
This has been updated on my Facebook Matrix page. Additionally, if you are having problems with a shifted source code search (in both Facebook and Instagram), watch this video for the solution.