If you're anything like us, yesterday's news that Facebook had introduced a supposed "Stalker Feature" sent waves of panic down your stalker-y spine. After all, the hallmark of Facebook has always been its anonymity—news that exes were now aware that their profiles were obsessively checked (by you!) each morning before work had users everywhere saying in earnest: "We are never searching for anyone on this thing again."

Hours after Gawker broke the story, Facebook released a statement clarifying what, exactly, the five names that suddenly popped up in your search box indicated:

"Facebook tries to surface the people we think are most important to users to make it easier and faster for them to navigate the site and find what they are looking for," the statement read. "The search drop down is not a list of those that have searched for the user. It is also not a list of people whose profile the user has viewed the most or who have viewed the user's profile the most."

So. If Facebook is telling the truth and not covering its ass to avoid a major PR disaster, the "List of 5" was essentially Facebook's recommendation of people its complex algorithms processed and decided you should be interested in. No further context regarding how the list was generated, or what Facebook actually meant by "most important to users," was supplied. The explanation seems far-fetched.

Literally minutes (like, 30) after the statement was posted online, the feature was deactivated altogether. Putting a prompt into the search box on your profile page now only gives you five of your friends in alphabetical order, according to their first name. The move left users even more mystified. (Seriously, who handles Facebook's PR? Why do they insist on springing features on users that they know are going to be universally denounced, causing the company to awkwardly backpedal? People are generally fine with change so long as you tell them beforehand.)

Some users we talked to said that while the feature was live on the site they had lists that consisted entirely of exes and flings. Some had an indecipherable mélange of random acquaintances, long-lost college friends, and other folks they hadn't talked to in years. Still others had lists comprised of legitimately good friends and crushes—that is, people they might actually communicate with on Facebook—with a random outlier thrown in for good measure.

What is Facebook trying to tell us about our searching habits? How could the same algorithm get things right for some people, yet be so off-base for others? In an attempt to hit on some, any, universal truth, we asked 50 people who checked out their "List of 5" while the feature was still functional and broke the results down based on the following 10 categories. The parenthetical that follows the category indicates the percentage of times it showed up on someone's list:

1) Acquaintance (28%)
2) Good Friend (18%)
3) Ex-Hookup (15%)
4) Ex-Boyfriend/Girlfriend (13%)
5) Crush (10%)
6) Current Boyfriend/Girlfriend (10%)
7) Current Hook-up (4%)
8) Huh? (2%)
9) Family member (Negligible)
10) Co-worker (Negligible)

So what's it all mean? First of all, it should be noted that for a lot of people, the results skewed heavily one way or another: Either it was all Good Friends, or none. (Oddly, the frequency with which someone used Facebook didn't seem to affect this.) The most popular result, Acquaintance, would indicate that there's a disconnect between the people Facebook thinks are important to you and the people that are actually important, meaning the thing was inherently flawed. Also, Facebook evidently feels it's crucial that you to keep tabs on people you used to date and fuck. Unhealthy! Though, to be honest, that's pretty much why we signed up for the thing in the first place.