Unicorn: A System for Searching the Social Graph [pdf]

[simonw]

https://www.facebook.com/download/138915572976390/UnicornVLDB-final.pdf

[pagekicker]

Can someone smart summarize what is surprising or educational in this paper?

[maxdemarzi → pagekicker]

Graph Search at Facebook scale is hard. They have to use tricks to get relevant results quickly. WeakAnd, StrongOr to limit connectedness.

If you are working on a smaller scale... it's easier.

Post: http://maxdemarzi.com/2013/01/28/facebook-graph-search-with-...

Code: https://github.com/maxdemarzi/neo_graph_search

Demo: http://neographsearch.maxdemarzi.com/

[simonw → pagekicker]

Have you tried Graph Search yet? It's astonishingly good, and runs complex graph queries across billions of edges in milliseconds. It's the most exciting advance in web-scale search/algorithms I've seen in a long time.

[bitwize]

Meanwhile, somewhere in the NSA, a presentation illuminates a darkened room:

UNICORN: Identifying Potential Terrorists by Walking the Graph of Known Social Connections

[Tichy → bitwize]

It's hardly an original idea to try to identify terrorists via social networks.