Quietly, without any formal update, a feature that allowed you to search through posts on Facebook has been taken out in the past week or so by Meta. This means you can look up something on, say, People, Videos or Marketplace but won’t be able to filter the results by Posts.
This was handy if you used Facebook like an online journal, to which you can return to check out a holiday trip to Bali a few years ago or an article you had shared. Of course, you could also use the search function to look up posts by friends, to recall the times you shared together, say, during school or in the office.
That is not so easy now because you can no longer look for stuff in earlier posts with the Facebook search bar. Instead, the results spit out by the somewhat unwieldy tool gives you a lot of things you don’t want, like unrelated people or pages.
It’s not all lost, fortunately. At the time of writing, you can still look up and search through your own posts. It’s just that this feature is now a little harder to get to.
When on the Facebook webpage or app, don’t click on the main search icon on your phone or PC screen. Instead, look for a different search tool that looks through your old posts.
On a PC Web browser, this is accessible through the “…” link on the right of the interface. Open the menu here and you will see Search as an option. Click on this and you’ll find a search bar for your own content on Facebook.
On the mobile phone, you have to fire up the Facebook app, and look up the same “…” menu on your profile page. Click this to open the menu and then select Search.
Similarly you can search for something a friend posted previously by heading to their profie page and finding that same “…” menu and loading the search bar there.
At least with this less-straightforward step, you can look up something you or your friends had shared on Facebook previously. You’d think it’s something that Meta would have made easy to do, yet like the company’s many other changes, it’s unclear why this one was made.
Note how Microsoft is offering to take snapshots of webpages you have visited and pictures you’ve shared on Windows, so you can use AI to dredge things up on your PC later.
Microsoft Recall may be controversial, because the saved content, though encrypted, is being recorded and stored all the time in the background. This makes for a larger attack surface for hackers to get in and steal your information.
On the contrary, Facebook post contain stuff you choose to share. So, Meta should be making it easier to find memories through these posts, not harder!
