Finally! Facebook has enabled the search bar with the ability to search for past posts. No more scrolling back through every single one of the last year’s posts, or trying to remember which album you saved a picture to while waiting for the 600 pictures to load so that you can scroll through them. Now the Facebook search bar can be used to type in words that relate to the post that you are looking for, and up pop the results!

Working at a Cincinnati marketing firm, being able to find past posts for clients quickly and easily is a huge bonus. Even easier, Facebook has created a way to search through results by separating them into different categories such as all posts and pictures, just pictures, people, pages, places and more. This is a huge time saver for users.

With this new feature I was worried about losing some features of the search bar that I use often such as finding restaurants that my friends have liked in other cities. The search bar seems to have retained its previous abilities while adding this new feature, so I can continue to consult friends’ recommendations while vacationing.

I did encounter one drawback that I’m surprised wasn’t addressed with the new feature. The user is not able to isolate search results to their own profile. The user can enter search terms with their own name and this will limit posts to the user and any friends they have with the same name, otherwise search results will yield hits from the user’s own profile mixed in with hits from all of their friends’ profiles. So if you want to find your own Christmas picture from five years ago and you have 3,000 friends and 200 have the same name as you, you will have to sift through everyone’s results. Additionally, results are still listed in chronological order with no way to jump back to three years ago, so you’re still going to have to scroll a half mile down the page for any hope of finding that post from 2011.

Regardless of the drawbacks I’m still pumped about this new feature. As users maintain profiles for longer periods of time, the ability to easily find past posts becomes more and more important.