Facebook has officially made it impossible to hide from it.
Starting today, its search bar is now capable of retrieving every public post ever made — that’s 2 trillion of them. It’s a major step in making Facebook’s search tool relevant when finding breaking news and trending topics, two areas dominated by Google and Twitter.
Previously, searching on Facebook would return Pages a user liked or friended. Now it will return basically everything, but displayed in a more organized manner.
For example, searching “Benghazi Committee” pulls up results from people “Involved in This Story” (in this instance, a post from Sen. Harry Reid); “Top Posts” from publishers that I both follow and don’t; and posts from friends. Lastly, there’s a “Public Posts” section that retrieves the “most recent and relevant” messages.
Here’s what it looks like in action:
Facebook users make 1.5 billion searches each days, it says in a blog post, the aim is to make people aware of its capabilities. The social network has an image problem when it comes to search since people don’t turn to it first when it comes to breaking news, and it was difficult to sort through the myriad of results.
Perhaps this will change that perception.
Images via Facebook.
More in Media
Creators turn to agentic AI to manage fan engagement
Creators are using AI agents to interact with their fans — and saving time and money as a result. However, marketers have some concerns.
Why Hearst built an AI voice assistant tool for Delish
What started as a weekend experiment is now a fully-fledged AI voice assistant on Hearst’s recipe site Delish, helping home cooks follow recipes hands-free.
WTF is ‘query fan-out’ in Google’s AI mode?
One major way Google’s AI Mode search feature differs from its traditional search engine is a complex technique called “query fan-out.”