facebooksearch1Remember that one time your friend posted about a killer bar in New York? Going back and finding that post in a sea of selfies used to be all but impossible – but now the company has announced that it has updated its search to make it easier to find a needle in a social haystack.

facebook212Now, typing something like “Heather wedding” into Facebook’s search box will turn up all of the posts that contain those words. It’s an attempt to make content more accessible, even as users see new and different things on their News Feed throughout the day. The new Facebook Search is based on the company’s Graph Search beta, which launched in March of last year.

Users can still search for content with the usual Graph Search queries, like “Photos of my friends taken in Washington” or “Friends of friends who live in Canada.”

In addition, users of Facebook’s official iPhone app will now have access to that search feature on their phones. (Android compatibility will be coming soon.) It’s a serious update, because the company’s mobile-only user base continues to grow. Until now, users of the company’s mobile apps didn’t have wide access to these sorts of powerful search.

With the roll-out of the new search tech, users may want to go back into their timelines and make sure that any embarrassing posts they made years ago have reasonable privacy settings. All searches still follow users privacy preferences for their posts, so if someone shared a picture with only their closest friends, those people would be the only ones able to find it. That’s fine for users who have been smart about their privacy since the beginning, but if there’s something truly horrifying lurking in your timeline, it will now be easier for some people to find.

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