Story by
Napier Lopez
ReporterNapier Lopez is a writer based in New York City. He's interested in all things tech, science, and photography related, and likes to yo-yo in Napier Lopez is a writer based in New York City. He's interested in all things tech, science, and photography related, and likes to yo-yo in his free time. Follow him on Twitter.
Facebook is making it a lot easier to find and share links on your posts – if you’re an iOS user.
Now when you write a post, a link icon will appear above your keyboard that will allow you to search for and share Web links right from the Facebook app.
It’s a convenient change for mobile. While it’s easy to open up a new tab on the desktop when you’re already using a browser to access Facebook anyway, having to exit your Facebook App, open a browser and then copy and paste a link on your phone is just cumbersome.
Given its number of users, Facebook had already built up a huge index of over a trillion posts that had already been previously shared, so it used that data to build it into the new status functionality, basically creating a sort of socially sourced search engine.
Facebook says the link search is still a work and progress and that it will be refining the technology as it prepares to bring the feature both the Android app and Messenger.
➤ Building “add a link” [Facebook | iOS]
Read next: Facebook is about to ramp up the number of Instant Articles on your feed
