As if Facebook has not had enough complaints recently over privacy issues, it has for some reason decided to make it easier for people to find any and all old posts uploaded by its users, including the embarrassing stuff that you forgot about and wish you had never posted.
It will do so with a new tool called Graph Search, currently only available to a limited number of people who are testing it through Facebook’s mobile app, which will enable its users to see any old content on the pages of their friends, as was first reported by Bloomberg. The tool is basically a search engine which allows you to find old content by subject using keywords about people or events.
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The advantage to users is that if you remember seeing an interesting post a long time ago then you will not need to sift through all of a friend’s pages when trying to find it. If the feature is added people will need only search for subject such as “Jim’s wedding” or “Party.”
Those concerned about privacy issues, however, can relax because their old content will only be visible by people that they allow to see it. Users are still able to limit access to their pages through the website’s security settings and, of course, can always delete any old posts that they now find to be embarrassing.
“We’re testing an improvement to search on mobile, ” Facebook told The Huffington Post in an email. “In this test you can use keywords to search for posts you’re in the audience for on Facebook.”
There is no word as to how long the company is going to take in its testing of the new feature, though, or if it will ever be formally incorporated into its website.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in July that “search for Facebook is going to be a multiyear voyage.”
In the company’s Q4 2013 earnings call, Zuckerberg stated, “There are more than a trillion status updates and unstructured text posts and photos and pieces of content that people have shared over the past 10 years, and indexing that was a really big deal, because as the number of people on the team who have worked on web search engines in the past have told me, a trillion pieces of content is more than the index in any web search engine.”
