Your embarrassing old Facebook posts will now be easier to find
Facebook has introduced a major update to its search feature, indexing the social network’s 2 trillion posts, making it easier for anyone to search through these posts. The move follows an update last year that made all individual posts searchable for friends and followers.
The new features, called “Search FYI”, are designed to make it easier to find information on Facebook. If lots of users are talking about an event such as evidence of water on Mars for example, it will find posts around that subject. The search results will display links from news organisations, posts from friends and popular public statuses from non-friends.
Facebook says that the tool will allow it to become more of a way of finding out what is going on — it will be possible to search for how people are reacting to a news event, for instance, or to find everything that everyone has said about a certain TV show. It will also allow Facebook to track more accurately what people are talking about, so that its search tools can offer information about what’s going on.
Facebook is also providing users with a review tool, which can be found in the “Who can see my stuff?” menu, that allows people to go through a timeline of everything they have posted and decide whether they want to make it private. The Facebook page owner can also the same settings page to limit posts only to friends or to specific people in future. The same choice can be made whenever you post — just underneath the status update page sits an audience option, which adjusts who will see the update.
