How people are going to spam and manipulate Facebook Graph Search?

Fake profiles - which are already surprisingly common - are the easiest tool available to influence search results. NOTE: I've never bothered with anything I'm about to describe because I don't think it's going to work long-term, but also because it's not ethical. How To Spam Facebook for Fun (and perhaps Profit) 1. Create Fake Profiles - lots of them. Creating a believable fake profile is something you can outsource, and I'd imagine a decent team of programmers could automate something that would create hundreds or thousands of fake profiles cheaply. 2. Start connecting these fake profiles to real people. In the days of MySpace, spammers would create profiles for good looking young women, then send friend requests to random young men, a portion of whom would connect. Once you have a few "legit" people as friends, it's that much easier to get all their friends to connect. 3. Leverage these fake profiles by liking as many different things as possible, except for sites that compete with whatever it is you're trying to promote. Rinse, wash, repeat. In a few months, you could have hundreds or thousands of fake profiles, all of which are connected to real people, and all of which like a particular product or service you're trying to promote via FB. Can Facebook beat this problem? Sure, but it will require making everyone who uses Facebook prove that they're a real person, and then limiting that real person to one account only. I don't see that happening anytime soon.

A big part of the problem with Graph Search is that it's basically just pay-to-play. It's powered by Facebook's "likes" so more likes is always going to mean higher placement in the search results. Facebook hopes that this will convince businesses to spend more and more of their marketing dollars on Facebook, where likes can indeed be bought and sold. With rivals like Google for example, no amount of money spent on ads can move you up in their search algorithm. Facebook knows how unreliable and even shady their likes can be. Rather than trying to fix that problem, they're trying to profit from it. So to answer the question, I think what we will see are the same old tricks currently used to get likes, but many times more often. "Like this page to see the answer to this riddle" and "Like this page to be entered into a contest" and "Like this page for a free coupon for 20% off XYZ" are already very common on Facebook, but if  Graph Search gains any traction, the frequency of those things will absolutely explode. Mark Zuckerberg will be the next Sanford Wallace.