How many times have you scrolled through old timeline posts or searched through a friend’s timeline or a business page looking for a particular article, joke or recipe recently shared on Facebook? This happens to me frequently when I want to reread an article or tell my husband about something I read on Facebook.
The new Graph Search function recently released by Facebook makes it easy to find these types of posts. The Graph Search feature is a “semantic search” designed to search by intended meaning rather than just a list of keywords. For example, one may search for “posts about The Walking Dead” or “Friends who like Seinfeld and Downton Abbey”.
The types of searches include:
- Places
- Check-ins of the user or friends or places the user or friends were tagged
- Results may be filtered by time or by a particular user’s News Feed
- Search within status updates, comments and posts
- Have the option to search the web, as well
One can also use the search function to search for all “Pages”, “Places”, Groups”, etc with certain words in the title.
Of course, with all the changes, privacy issues come to the surface. This article http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/07/08/facebook_graph_search_privacy_nightmare_is_preventable_if_you_change_your.html will tell you how to change the privacy settings on past status updates, comments and wall posts (because these posts will now be accessible through Graph Search depending on how your privacy settings were set originally) prior to introduction of Timeline.
So, what do you think about Facebook’s new search function?
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