Facebook is making a big change to the way search works on its platform today: it’s now opening up search to all of its over 2 trillion posts.
When Facebook first introduced graph search in 2013, it was limited to searching through your friends’ posts, but now you can look through any public post ever made. In the company’s own words:
When you search, you’ll now see the most recent, relevant public posts along with posts from your friends. Search results are organized to help you cut through the noise and quickly understand what the world is saying about a topic in the moment.
Additionally, you’ll now be able to pull-to-refresh on the search page for the latest posts on mobile, and Facebook is adding a way to look through public posts about popular links. It even lets you see popular quotes and phrases by users related to that post, and provides an “aggregate overview of sentiment” about a particular topic.
Although expanding search may not sound like a big deal, it could have major repercussions for the way people use the social network. Basically, Facebook is becoming more like Twitter. Instead of just keeping you largely tied to you, your friends, and friends of friends, now you can look up any topic the world is talking about, and see what everyone else has to say.
In fact, the update – especially the aggregate posts on particular topics – is highly reminiscent of Twitter’s recently announced Moments feature. Combine this with Facebook’s new focus on news and video, and it’s clear it want to become the main platform for discussing current events.
The updated search is rolling out now to everyone in the US on iPhone, Android and the desktop Web interface.
➤ Search FYI: Find What the World is Saying With Facebook Search [Facebook]
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