People You May Know looks at, among other things, your current friend list and their friends, your education info and your work info. If you are already friends on Facebook with some people from your last job, for example, you may find some more of your former coworkers (assuming they are visible to you in search) among the "People You May Know' suggestions.

You'll see People You May Know on the Find Friends page and even as News Feed stories. The Home page box will only appear with what People You May Know considers to be its very best suggestions. We hope that most of these suggestions are people you want to be friends with, but we know that might not always be the case. To solve for any mistakes, you can remove someone from the People You May Know list by clicking the little "x" icon next to the name. The person you "x" won't be notified and that feedback will be used to improve the quality of the future suggestions. In addition, you will not appear as a suggestion for the person that you "x" out.

We introduced this feature somewhat recently with the specific intention of helping the newest people on Facebook find their friends quickly. Since then, we've constantly been making changes to the tool. We started showing it to everyone, not just new users, and we changed the rules so that it only shows on the home page when the suggestions are strong enough. If you "x" all of the suggestions we have, eventually the box will disappear. We will continue to make changes based on the feedback we hear, so please let us know what you think.

Florin is a Facebook Engineer.