Facebook finally adding search feature to let you look through old posts

By

facebook
Facebook is experimenting with a feature allowing you to more easily search through old posts.

As more and more of our lives are lived on social media, the importance of being able to efficiently search through content is greater than ever.

With that in mind, Facebook is currently user-testing a new feature letting mobile users sift through old posts by friends using keywords — allowing them to more easily find content that would otherwise be lost.

The feature, which only counts for posts you’re allowed to see (meaning that private posts won’t show up) has currently only been rolled out to a select few, but will likely be officially added into an update of the Facebook iOS app in the near future.

The addition is part of a push over the past two or three years to turn Facebook into a “mobile first” company: a phrased used by Facebook engineer Vijay Shankar when I interviewed him earlier this year. With the addition of search tools, the idea is that harder-to-navigate mobile devices will be easier for users to extract relevant information from.

An example given by Bloomberg suggests that users can “type in keywords like ‘graduation party Christina Jones’ to quickly find posts from that friend about the party.” A Graph Search function also allows mobile users to discover friends’ likes and connections, with queries such as, “my friends who like Japanese food.”

Source: Bloomberg

Via: Engadget

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.