Facebook Is Finally Rolling Out The Ability To Search For Posts

Facebook is finally taking the wraps off the long awaited search-within-posts feature.

The company announced today that it will be rolling out the search update for desktop and the iOS mobile app starting this week for English language users in the United States. The announcement comes more than a year after Facebook promised to give users the ability to search for posts on the social network.

That was part of a Graph Search update that was never released beyond a very limited set of testers. In that testing, Facebook learned that users are most interested in being able to locate content that they had already seen within their News Feeds, so Facebook has optimized this update to make it easier for people to find posts from people and pages that they have connections with.

Tom Stocky, Facebook’s vice president of search, explained to Marketing Land:

“When we talk to people who use Facebook, the things they actually ask for, which seems like such small thing to a lot of us who have been thinking about search for a long time, is I saw something in my News Feed last week, yesterday, this morning, a year ago. I just want to be able to get back to it. So that’s the thing we’ve made work really well.”

Unlike previous Graph Search trials, this update will not surface posts from people or pages that users have no Facebook connection with, no doubt disappointing journalists and marketers hoping to use it as a research tool. Facebook hasn’t given up on that functionality, Stocky said, but wants to dial-in the current user experience before tackling that.

Read the full story at Search Engine Land.