You can now find old status updates and posts in general on Facebook with a simple search. We show you how to do so through the website and the iPhone apps.
Over the years, you and your friends on Facebook have posted hundreds upon thousands of posts – status updates, photos, videos, check-ins and a lot more. Being able to search and find old status updates is a feature that Facebook has only rolled out in the past few days. It took them just a few months over six years to do it.
The only way to do it before said feature was rolled out was to literally scan through old posts one by one on your own timeline or a friend’s timeline. This often worked on timelines with less number of posts, but for people like yours truly who post a few items every day, it only results in frustration.
So, how do you find old status updates the new way? It is easy! You use the Search bar from the News Feed just as you did before. Simply type in words from the old status update or post that you remember, click on your search query at the bottom of the suggested search, and there’s a good chance Facebook will find it for you.
Step 1: Type in any memorable words from the status update
Step 2: Click on the bottom-most search suggestion.
Step 3: Scroll down to see returned results! Facebook highlights words from your search query in the posts themselves so you know how it found them.
This works exactly the same and equally well on the iPhone and iPad app. Just replace ‘click’ in Step 2 with ‘tap’:
So there you have it. It is now extremely simple to find old status updates and posts on Facebook. I hope they add more filtering and advance search options now to make it easier to narrow down older posts.
