When you start searching for someone in Facebook's search bar, it will automatically start bringing back finds. What is the algorithm here? Is order arbitrary, and if not what determines it?
Edit:
My reason for asking is that a friend of mine tried searching for "Rachel", and the first result was a Rachel that was friends with me. Their only common friend is me. Below her was another Rachel with whom he shared more mutual friends. This just seemed peculiar so I was wondering if anyone had some insight into why this might be the case.
Best Answer
I don't know for certain (I don't work for Facebook!), but from my experience it seems to bring back results in (approximately) the following order:
After this it starts to become more guesswork, but I suspect that home town, shared work places etc all come into play as well.
With more than 500 million users there's a lot of data and existing connections they can use to base their heuristics on