Searching on Facebook has always been good for tracking down an old friend or a page to follow, but Google was always better suited for keeping up with news or finding a story from a year back. Facebook hopes to remedy that with a new, expanded search that sifts through billions of public posts from all over the world — not just those from your friends and followed pages.
Related: Facebook's New News Feed: See Best Friends' Updates First
Say you search for a music festival you heard about. The first result would be, hopefully, the official page, followed by any major news stories announcing the lineup and so on. Then would come your friends' posts mentioning the festival, and then posts from others you might not know or follow (a band or organizer perhaps) — only public ones, of course. It could be quite useful, and just as Facebook surely plans, it saves you a trip to another search engine.
Some searches will have special results, too — search for a sports league during a championship and you'll see updated brackets, live scores and the latest games.
The updated search functions are rolling out now to the iOS, Android, and Web versions of Facebook.
