Facebook Graph API search limit & offset

Question

I want to do a query like this:

search?q=KEY_NAME&type=page&fields=id,name,location&limit=500&offset=0

when I do this the first time the result is about 470 results, now I put offset to 471 and repeat the query

search?q=KEY_NAME&type=page&fields=id,name,location&limit=500&offset=471

and the result is empty.

Why? The key_name is a famous word like "fan" and I don't think that there are only 471 results on fb pages!

What is the problem?

Answer 1

Never use a limit that high, afaik a limit of 100 should be the maximum. Everything else may be buggy. If you use this API call, you get more than 500 with paging:

/search?pretty=0&fields=idmname,location&q=fan&type=page&limit=100

Don´t use "offset", always use the "next" link in the JSON document to get the next batch of results: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/using-graph-api/v2.4#paging

The next 100 entries would be available with the following endpoint for me:

/search?pretty=0&fields=idmname,location&q=fan&type=page&limit=100&after=OTkZD

Answer 2

Please refer to this following blog post in which it says https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/478/

gist of it.

As such, when querying the following tables and connections, use time-based paging instead of “offset” to ensure you are getting back as many results as possible with each call. For these Graph API connections, use the “since” and “until” parameters