Ben Squires
News

Facebook about to make all of your posts to date searchable

Facebook is reportedly index all of its posts, so people can easily search for them.

Why is this a big deal? Well it basically means anything you’ve ever put up on the social network is now easily accessible, from an angry post you made in the heat of the moment five years ago to an unfortunate change of relationship status that you’d rather not mention anymore.

Facebook reportedly contains roughly two trillion posts made by users over the years and soon enough all of these will be accessible with the new search function.

Rousseau Kazi, a product manager on Facebook's search team, explained the decision, “Because we’ve indexed the entire world’s conversations, we tell you things that are trending, things that are breaking, what's happening right now. The whole idea here is that if you can group these pieces of content in certain ways, it makes it pretty easy to get the full story.”

While this is a fascinating idea that would provide a Facebook time capsule for any moment or event, it’s also a tad unsettling to think anything posted on Facebook (that may have even been made public accidentally) is now indexed and easily searchable for any user.

The good news is you don’t have to opt in! If you don’t want old posts to show up to the world when they search change your privacy settings and determine who can look at your posts.

To change your Facebook privacy settings click here.

Related links:

Facebook will tell you if government is spying on you

The Facebook app that’s draining your phone battery

Why you should never post photos of your boarding pass

Tags:
News, Facebook, Search engine, Privacy