JOIN USWill we finally be able to search FB posts?
Nearly two years after Facebook publicly promised to give its users the ability to search the social network for past posts made by their friends, the company is finally ready to turn it on.
Facebook recently said it was expanding the capabilities of its search box to allow free-form searches of anything posted on the service. The improvements will be rolled out to English-language users of Facebook in the United States soon on desktop and iPhone versions, with Android to follow.
In theory, that means you will soon be able to dredge up, say, that post your best friend made about the best croissants in Paris three years ago, or that cute photo from your niece’s first birthday party, or your witty, impromptu review of the original “Hunger Games” movie. Type in a few keywords and whatever else you might remember about the original post, and Facebook says it should come up.
If it works — a big if, given the company’s record of overpromising on search — it could unlock all that information that Facebook has so eagerly asked us to share on the service and make it a helpful digital archive of moments both trivial and important in our lives.
“We have indexed all the content on Facebook,” said Rousseau Kazi, a product manager at the company who works on the search team.
That’s a lot of indexing. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, told investors in January that users had posted more than one trillion pieces of content that needed to be analyzed for post search to work.
Until now, search on Facebook has been limited to certain categories of information, such as city of residence or pages your friends have liked. To get even that, you needed to type your query in a certain syntax, such as “My friends who live in Seattle and like Starbucks.” And search worked only on the desktop version of Facebook, not mobile.
In a world where Google’s search engine encourages you to type the way you speak, fixes misspellings and tries to anticipate what you are looking for based on your location, your email, your calendar and your past searches, that meant that Facebook’s search function was woefully inadequate.
Kazi said the new version of search spent about nine months in testing before the company decided to roll it out widely. To keep the universe of possible results as relevant as possible, you will only get posts that you or your Facebook friends interacted with in some fashion. And Facebook says it is still applying its normal privacy rules so that you cannot see anything you did not already have the ability to see based on the original post’s privacy settings.
He gave the example of a Facebook search manager whose friend was looking for an earlier post that recommended pediatricians in Seattle. The Facebook employee did a quick search, brought up the old post immediately and sent it to her friend.
“We keep the content quality really high on this,” Kazi said.
Facebook is not doing this purely out of a desire to be more useful. The company has tested advertising that can be run against particular keywords in Facebook posts. Google has made many billions of dollars from search ads, and as the search technology is refined, Facebook could eventually offer marketers the ability to show targeted ads based on the content of status updates.