One of my biggest gripes with Facebook was how underwhelming its search functionality was. You could only search people & pages before and it improved a bit after the company added support for hashtags. Fortunately, Facebook has fixed this by announcing a total overhaul on its search functionality.
Facebook says that now it has indexed over 2 trillion posts and currently over 1.5 billion search queries are made per day which are huge numbers by any measure. They have improved 3 key things on Search:
- Finding conversations: It is now possible to find and track entire conversations on Facebook where search will display the links, posts and an aggregated view of the posts shared about the topic of interest.
- Search results will now display the current public posts which include the ones posted by your friends.
- Improved search suggestions: As you type on the search box, you will be shown events that are happening in the moment so that you can be up to date.
This means it will be now easier to discover posts about a certain trend easily. This may necessitate you to label some of your posts as public in order to make sure your posts can be seen by a larger audience.
It is a significant update to the Facebook system and it comes at a time Instant Articles were released to mobile users worldwide. This will make it easy to find content to read on Facebook thereby making the social network a major source of news.
The new updates will be rolled out to all mobile users (iOS and Android) as well as on desktop from today.
