I have read through the facebook developers documentation and it is not clear to me so a couple of questions:
I need to register my application, web app or desktop app, and then get a an access token to access non public data.
But then it mentions that I need to get an access token from each user to reference their private data. What if I just want to search the graph api using keywords and retrieve as much non public data as possible?
The developers forums is a terrible place to try and get help. Twitter makes it quite clear in their documentation that you dont need an access token to search its api.
NEW….
I understand that an access token is needed to access an individuals private content when using the graph api. What is considered private in a fan page and do you need an access token to access all fan page content? When running a word search with type=posts in the graph api we expect only public content, is this the same for fan page searches and if not, is there really any need to have an access token when searching the graph api?
Well you can try that. Usually Graph API only provides you “/me” that is: First/Last name, Gender, Locale. I think you cannot even retrieve the friend list via Graph without the user’s permission, even if it is public.
The point is: You get the access token with permission from the user. But the step before is to get an App ID.
You can access a fan page via Graph:
https://graph.facebook.com/googlechrome
But you can’t get the fans without an access token:
https://graph.facebook.com/googlechrome/friends
This is consistent with Facebook’s UI, when visiting a fan page, you only see the Facepile of the fans, but you cannot see all fans. Here some more is information, although it’s not explicit about fan pages: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissions