How can I search Facebook, like a private investigator?

Learn how to find people on Facebook and use the tricks that online investigators use.

With over 2 billion users, Facebook is the largest social media platform in existence. Doing a Facebook search or Dorking has been made easier, and thus the odds of you finding a person on Facebook are pretty high. The main goal of Facebook is bringing people together through sharing of information and for this reason, users on Facebook are allowed to add tons of information to their profiles.

In today’s article, we’ll discuss:

  • Ways to improve your social media search using Facebook.
  • Facebook Dorking.
  • Examples of Google dorks.
  • Importance of Google dorks.

By the end, you should be able to do find anyone on Facebook by doing a Facebook username search or through a simple Facebook search.

Let’s begin!

First thing first, what’s my Facebook username?

In simple terms, a Facebook username is the user ID that is used to make your Facebook profile which can be used by anyone to find you on the network. You can use your name or surname to create a Facebook username. Sometimes Facebook may suggest a username for you or you can also create your own. Your Facebook username should be unique and not used by any of the users on the platform.

Your Facebook Username is shown in the URL and on your page name.  People can search and find you by this.
Your Facebook Username is shown in the URL and on your page name. People can search and find you by this.

How to use Facebook Search for Friends

One of the easiest ways to do a Facebook search on your friend is by using the feature “Search for friends”. If you know the name or the username of the person you’re’ looking for on Facebook, these are the steps to follow:

Searching for someone via a friend of a friend is one of the hidden secrets online investigators use to find people on Facebook, who have their profile set as private.
  1. Using your PC or mobile open Facebook and go to your profile page.
  2. From the menu displayed on your PC, select friends.
  3. In the search box, enter the username or name of your friend
  4. A drop-down list will appear of all the matching profiles. Move the cursor over the name of your friend to view their profile or contact them.

Search friends of your friends

What if the friend you are trying to find on Facebook unfriended you or for some reason does not appear on your friends’ list? If that’s the case, you can still find them by doing a free social media search on Facebook.

To find someone who isn’t on your friends’ list, you can use one of your friends on Facebook to locate them. They might be studying, working, or living together in the same city with them.

Follow these steps to know how you can use the feature “Search friends of your friends” on Facebook:

Preventing people on Facebook from seeing your friends of friends is an additional feature they must disable, it does not default. They may make their profile private, but if they don’t disable this feature, you can find them via their friends.
  1. The first step is to turn on the filter “Friends of friends” on Facebook. Open Facebook on your PC or Mobile device and input the name of the individual into the search box.
  2. Under the filters section, you will see the menu of “People”. Under this option, select “Friends of friends.
  3. A list of all the people with similar names that you have mutual friends with will appear.

And in case you are not so sure about the exact names or usernames of the person you are looking for on Facebook, you can use the page “People you may know” to find them. Usually, Facebook uses your friends’ list to come up with a list of “people you may know” based on your location.

When creating an account, Facebook asks for your information about the schools you have attended and your recent workplaces.

You’ll be required to fill in information about the university or college you went to and also the company you worked for as shown below.

It’s logical to presume that the person you’re trying to do a Facebook search on them has probably provided these details.

Follow these steps to know how to look for friends by using the option “Search old schools and workplaces”

Workplaces

If someone is part of a group or company page on Facebook, you can visit the company page and find the user within this section.

If the person you want to do a “Facebook username search” on worked or is working in the same company as you did, you can find them by using the “Work” filter on Facebook. To do that, use this path;

  1. Go to your Facebook profile page.
  2. Select friends and click on the “work” option in the menu.
  3. A list of all your work colleagues will appear.

University

If a profile is hidden but is part of a group associated with a university, you can find them on Facebook!

You can also use the “University” filter to locate Facebook friends who went to the same institution as you. You can find people who attended the same school as you by using these steps;

  1. Go to your Facebook profile page.
  2. Click the menu friends and select the option “University” from the menu.
  3. Once again, you will see a list of all the people that have listed the same university or college on their profile.

What if you aren’t sure whether your email contacts are on Facebook? You may do a Facebook search on a friend using their name but still get nothing. Importing email contacts to Facebook will help you find friends and business associates who may be using a different username on the network.

You can do these in two ways. Manually typing the email contacts or importing your email contacts.

Manually typing your email contacts

To use the “Search your email contacts” feature, use the following steps:

  1. Sign in to your Facebook page then head over to the “friends” section.
  2. Enter the email address in the search box then initiate Facebook search.
  3. The profiles of your friends may appear on the page.
A lot of people don’t publicize their email on Facebook anymore, but if they have..this traditional tried and tested method sometimes works!

Importing your email contacts

The second way you can search for friends on Facebook is by importing your email contacts. This method will automatically list every Facebook profile found for your email contacts. Additionally, importing your email contacts to Facebook is efficient and will save you a lot of time.

These are steps to follow to Upload your email contacts on Facebook:

  1. Log in to your Facebook page and select the option; Settings and Privacy> Settings.
  2. Navigate down and then tap on permissions.
  3. Click on “Upload contacts” option
  4. Your email contacts will start to upload on Facebook.
  5. The profiles of your email contacts in Facebook will display.
  6. You can decide to view their profiles and send them a friend request.

Facebook Dorking

Have you ever tried to search for a particular thing on Google or Facebook and couldn’t find anything on it? Guess what, you are not the first one to encounter this issue. To understand what Facebook Dorking is, let’s dive into the “internet concept” first.

The internet is a huge database with an extensive library of information/data available to us through Search engines. Let’s take Google, for instance, it is the most used search engine today that can give you access to any information by just doing a simple search.

However, due to the amount of information available online, a user can encounter problems in choosing the right source of information to use, or navigating through the large volumes of information can be quite chaotic. For this reason, Google created a solution to sort out tons of information by presenting users with the most relevant information.

Google Dorking: a method used by ethical hackers to utilize Google’s advanced search functions to find valuable information (information not available on a website).

What is Facebook Dorking?

Facebook Dorking is a feature in Google’s search engine that allows users to search for specific keywords. The results of the search are filtered to pages whose description/names comprise those specific keywords.

Facebook Dorking allows you to search for posts, then you can filter the post to the specific groups or pages that you are interested in. Even so, it is not possible to search for content that is only available within pages.

Conveniently, all the URLs of Facebook pages have a special reference that shows a certain content is from a particular Facebook page. This is very useful when we want to find a specific entity about a page on Facebook.

To explore more related Facebook pages or results, even the ones that don’t contain the keyword, the Google inurl dork; “keyword” site for Facebook, can be used.

Google Dork examples to search in Google, plus the results

Here are examples of some of the Google dorks that you can use to help improve your searches. They are quite easy to use provided that the syntax is ok.

1. intitle:

Google Dorking for a page that starts with the title ‘Admin Login’. You could do the same for the Facebook username.

The intitle operator simply instructs Google to search for a specific term within the heading of a particular document. Most of the search engines will display the title of a given document at the top title bar of the window’s browser.

For example; The intitle; “Admin Login” searches only pages with “Admin” in the title, and “Login” elsewhere on the page.

2. allintext:

The allintext Google dork only finds the text within pages. The dork doesn’t search for links or page titles.

For example; the allintext “Contact” will only find texts of “contact” available on all pages in Google.

See the image below.

3. inurl:

This Google operator instructs Google to search for a web address of a document or do a search based on the URL only. The inurl dork requires no other search entities.

For example, the inurl “news.php?id=” will show pages with the term “news.php?id=” in their web address.

See the image below.

4. Site:

The Google operator “site” will instruct google to narrow a search to a particular website or a domain. This search operator requires an additional search entity.

For example, consider a site like amazon.com “mytv”

This search will find results from amazon.com that include the term “mytv” anywhere on the page as shown below.

5. Filetype:

This Google operator will direct Google to perform a search only within the text of one file.

The operator will also need an additional search entity.

For example, “filetype:pdf” will limit the search to only Files and PDF documents.

6. Info:

This Google operator will instruct Google to search and display pages that contain links to related searches, pages with the URL, and backlinks.

This is similar to trying manually the URL into the search box.

For example, the syntax; info:www.exampel.com will display as:

Hyperlinks are one of the basic principles behind the internet.  A link or hyperlink is a selected connection that pinpoints one web page to the other. Hyperlinks are used to connect different web pages.

Often, hyperlinks will appear as underlined text. These links can also appear as videos, images, or any multimedia content format.

A link is an advanced operator that instructs Google to search within hyperlinks of a given search term. They require no additional entity.

For example, a link like amazon.com will display all the web pages that link to amazon.com’s main page.

8. Cache:

Sometimes a page may have recently gone offline, or recently gone private. But you can access the cache of it via google. You can also use https://archive.org/.

The cache operator instructs Google to display the version of a specific website as it appeared when Google was used to visit the site. This advanced operator does not need additional search entities. For example; “cache:amazon.com” will display the cached version of amazon.com’s web page.

Why are Google dorks important?

Google dorks are the first-hand tools that can you expand your internet search. With Google dorks, you can easily run advanced searches and find valuable information that is not usually available on websites.

Also, you can use these Google dorks tools to expand your free social media search on all social networks. You can also do a Facebook search using Google dorks.  

Are you a business person looking to expand your market? I suggest you learn how to use the Google Dorking tools because they may come in handy and help you out in finding suitable arenas where you can market your business.

Also, using Facebook dorking, you can expand your Facebook search and meet new friends who could be interested in buying your services or products.

More Facebook Searching fun

Usually, it’s pretty cool to learn something new. I hope that you have learned how to effectively search on Facebook using different ways as discussed in the article. You can also check our other post on How to find someone on Facebook?

Good luck in finding old buddies and making new friends. It is fun to have like-minded and lots of friends that you can openly share your ideas with.

Also, don’t forget to check out the Google dork tools. They can be really helpful to expand your internet searches.

Thank you for dropping by today. See you in the next article!

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